Sunset Kino
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens | June 22, 2024 – July 11, 2024
Sunset Kino is Canada's only outdoor, avant-garde film festival. Founded by Séamus Kealy in Austria in 2017, this festival continues now at Oakville Galleries. Introduced by the programmers and commencing at sunset, audiences experience a curated program of films and videos by Canadian and international artists.
This year's theme, “Everything is a Lie," complements the summer exhibition by Hedda Roman, entitled Rogue Planet, which prompts a reflection on how machine learning and digital technologies shape, distort, and reconstruct our perceptions. Sunset Kino explores narratives that inform our current world, encouraging deeper consideration of the influence of digitalization on identity and the authenticity of our personal and collective stories. The program thus ventures into themes of truth and fiction; reality and virtuality; distortion and propaganda; disinformation and representation; as well as how art, film, ideas and politics all intersect in a rapidly changing world.
All films are screened outdoors in Gairloch Gardens. Please dress appropriately and bring seating and blankets. With inclement weather, screenings will be indoors in the Studio, adjacent to the Gallery.
Parallel to Sunset Kino is our summer exhibition “Hedda Roman: Rogue Planet (Tue-Sat 10 am -5 pm).
Oakville Galleries operates with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario and the Corporation of the Town of Oakville, along with our many individual, corporate, and foundation partners.
Films by Catherina Cramer, Daphne Fietz, Fynn Ribbeck, and Silke Schönfeld (DE)
Programmed by Hedda Roman (DE)
Body of Evidence, Catherina Cramer (DE), 2023-24, 30 minutes
Every decade has its leading disease. In 2033, people are afflicted by a mysterious fatigue. The symptoms point to a comeback of burnout. But conventional therapeutic methods show no success. Something is wrong. Dylan, the self-appointed health detective, investigates the matter.
An Eggshell Mind, Fynn Ribbeck (DE), 2023, 12 minutes
Unfolding as a dream sequence, the film explores the human condition under totalitarianism while paying homage to silent propaganda films of the early 1900s, exploring the power dynamics and erosion of autonomy within a totalitarian regime.
Ich darf sie immer alles fragen/ I may always ask her anything, Silke Schönfeld (DE), 2023, 15 minutes
The cutting down of a cherry tree becomes the starting point of an intimate dialogue about transgenerational trauma between mother and daughter.
Content note: The film contains descriptions of experiences of sexual violence.
How are you?, Daphne Fietz (DE), 2018, 19 minutes
This film is based on a visit to Orania, a white Afrikaner settlement in South Africa, which gained global fame for its ''Neo Apartheid.” Through the fragmentation of footage, this film questions the boundaries of racism and the white body in relation.
Films by Aideen Barry (IE)
Programmed by Séamus Kealy (CA/IE)
Possession, Aideen Barry (IE), 2011, 6 minutes
The film’s protagonist, a housewife, succumbs to a morbid set of circumstances, responding to her household obligation through absurd gestures that defy reality. Darkly humorous phenomenological reasoning plays on our perceptions of modern living.
Klostės (Folds/Pleats), Aideen Barry (IE), 2022, 67 minutes
Klostės is a 4K nonverbal monochromatic stop-motion animated feature based on a number of short stories, myths, and hidden histories of the inter-war modernist city of Kaunas in Lithuania.
Not to be Known, Aideen Barry (IE), 2015, 6 minutes
This stop-motion film shows the artist overwhelmed by the monotony and magnitude of domestic chores in nightmarish scenarios. The dark-humoured, uncanny film expands upon Barry’s exploration of obsessional behaviour within a suburban “normality.”
ᖃᐅᔨᒪᔭᐅᔪᓐᓃᖅᑐᑦ / SEACHMALLTACHT / OBLIVION, Aideen Barry (IE), 2022, 15 minutes
This film merges images of poisoned lands with archival elements of outlawed folk music (Irish Harp and Inuit throat singing) and with spoken word to become a “Gothic Dance Apocalyptic Electronica Artwork.”
Films by Jayce Salloum (CA), Sanaz Sohrabi (IR/CA), Rehab Nazzal (PS/CA), & Ali Kazimi (IN/CA)
Programmed by Faisal Anwar (PK/CA) & Tazeen Qayyum (PK/CA)
untitled part 9: this time, Jayce Salloum (CA), 2008, 6 minutes
This film is the ninth instalment of Salloum’s series, untitled video tapes. Children in a rural school in Afghanistan tell jokes featuring a man named Nasreddin. The film questions whether, like a joke, a documentary can be an ordinary gesture linked to everyday life.
Auxiliary Mirrors, Sanaz Sohrabi (IR/CA), 2016, 12 minutes
This experimental video-essay is set around the ‘status of image’, its materiality, and the latent narratives it can or cannot make visible.
Vibrations from Gaza, Rehab Nazzal (PS/CA), 2023, 16 minutes
This film offers a glimpse into the experiences of deaf children in the colonised and confined coastal territory of Gaza, Palestine.
Continuous Journey, Ali Kazimi (IN/CA), 2004, 87 minutes
This film is an inquiry into the largely ignored history of Canada’s exclusion of the South Asians by the immigration policy called the Continuous Journey Regulation of 1908. This film thus challenges us to reflect on contemporary events, and question how the past shapes the present.
Films by Adrian Paci (AL/IT)
Programmed by Séamus Kealy (CA/IE)
A Real Game, Adrian Paci (AL/IT), 1997, 9 minutes
Paci and his daughter take part in a fictional game, in which Paci pretends to be the teacher while his daughter plays the part of the pupil that tells her personal story.
Believe me I am an artist, Adrian Paci (AL/IT), 2000, 7 minutes
We witness Adrian Paci’s dialogue with a police officer in a police station in Milan. In the video, Paci attempts to explain his positionality as an artist in relation to a series of photographs in question by the officer.
Vajtojca, Adrian Paci (AL/IT), 2002, 9 minutes
Vajtojca deals with themes of reflection on death and its possible aesthetic interpretation. The film documents and testifies the attempt of the artist to construct a live dialogue with the inevitable presence of death.
Per Speculum, Adrian Paci (AL/IT), 2006, 7 minutes
The main characters of Per Speculum are children engaged in daring the sun with the segments of a mirror. The work seems suspended in an undetermined, archetypical dimension of time and space, the title quotes the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face.”
The Guardians, Adrian Paci (AL/IT), 2015, 6 minutes
This film is a poetic reflection on the relationship between childhood and death. The story takes place in the Catholic cemetery of the artist’s hometown, Shkodra.
U'ncuontru, Adrian Paci, 2021 (AL/IT), 17 minutes
U’ncuontru is inspired by the Easter Sunday ritual of the Madonna vasa vasa, which has always been attended by thousands of people. In the pandemic era, the ritual was not possible. In this film, Paci imagines a nocturnal, ‘clandestine’ meeting all the same.
Di queste luci si servirà la notte, Adrian Paci (AL/IT), 2017, 10 minutes
This film takes its name from an action on the Arno River conceived by Adrian Paci. The gestures of that action return to the video, speaking of the river where everything flows from its hidden identity to the memory of the water, from the continuous transit of things and of our human condition.
Interregnum, Adrian Paci (AL/IT), 2017, 17 minutes
Interregnum collects and assembles fragments extracted from videos documenting the funerals of Communist dictators of different nationalities and eras, recovered from official state archives and national television broadcasts.
The Column, Adrian Paci (AL/IT), 2013, 26 minutes
Following the production of a classical Western column model by Asian workers on a voyage towards Europe, this film investigates the capitalist logic of profit in the perfect merging of the time of production with the time of transport.
