Sunset Kino
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens | June 25, 2026 – July 16, 2026
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 program and theme builds on our current exhibition, To Fall, Patiently by renowned artist Ali Cherri who explores the entangled histories of artifacts, labour, environmental transformation, and the enduring struggle for survival in the aftermath of catastrophe. The various artists and works in this summer’s program focuses on what rises from the ruins, and includes an array of experimental video and film that shows the persistence of life through facism, occupation, war and sickness.
The first two Thursday evenings will showcase Cherri’s award-winning films including the acclaimed short, The Watchman, which explores the mind and imagination of a solitary soldier on nightly watch on a remote outpost between the Greek Cypriot south and the Turkish Cypriot north. These two evenings will offer a rare opportunity to view Cherri’s substantial body of film and video, reflecting on the artist’s profound understanding of the relationship between humans and land, and his penetrating ability to represent history.
The third Sunset Kino program on July 9th is co-curated by Séamus Kealy and Jenifer Papararo who bring together five artists and films that trace how life endures after struggle and trauma through community, memory, the body, and understandings of belonging.
The final evening will be curated by distinguished scholar Rinaldo Walcott whose research is in the area of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, gender and sexuality with interests in nations, nationalisms, multiculturalism, policy and education broadly defined. He will engage the theme of In Ruins to bring together artists who address war, technology and ruined landscapes alongside others who address memory, history and displacement. The works present will span historical periods and geographies
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.
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 Ali Cherri
Programmed by Séamus Kealy
Pipe Dreams, 2011 (7 mins)
Two moments in the history of contemporary Syria that echo the situation across all Arab countries: a memorable phone call between the Syrian cosmonaut Muhammed Faris who was part of the Russian mission to the Mir Space Station and the late president Hafez al-Assad, and the removal of the statue of Assad by the Syrian government to prevent its destruction by the demonstrators.
Un Cercle autour du Soleil, 2005 (15 mins)
This film is a reflection on growing up in Beirut during the civil war years, and how to adapt to the “post war” life; accepting the body that is in ruin, and learning to live in the city that is always already in ruin.
The Disquiet, 2013 (20 mins)
Earth-shattering events are relatively par for the course in Lebanon, with war, political upheaval and social revolts. Lebanon stands on several major fault lines, which are cracks in the earth’s crust. The film investigates the geological situation in Lebanon, trying to look for the traces of the imminent disaster.
The Digger, 2015 (24 mins)
For twenty years, Sultan Zeib Khan has kept watch over a ruined Neolithic necropolis in the Sharjah desert in the United Arab Emirates. This film’s movement between day and night along with the soundscape of the man’s singing and his radio here resist an otherwise deep solitude.
Somniculus, 2015 (15 mins)
Filmed inside a series of empty museum galleries across Paris, Ali Cherri's Somniculus articulates the tension between the lives of dead objects and the living world that surrounds them
The Watchman, 2023 (26 mins)
Sergeant Bulut dutifully maintains a solitary guard atop a remote watchtower. Night after night, Bulut scans the horizon, awaiting an enemy that never materializes—until the sudden appearance of late-night visitors disrupts his routine.
The Dam by Ali Cherri
Programmed by Séamus Kealy
The Dam, 2022 (84 mins)
Sudan, near the Merowe dam. Maher works in a traditional brickyard fed by the waters of the Nile. Every evening, he secretly wanders off into the desert to build a mysterious construction made of mud. While the Sudanese people rise to claim their freedom, his creation starts to take a life of its own.
Films by Lida Abdul, Quenton Miller, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, Jumana Manna, Anouk Verviers
Programmed by Séamus Kealy and Jenifer Papararo
Lida Abdul, In Transit, 2008 (5 mins)
This stunning 16 mm film is centred around an abandoned Soviet military plane, the detritus of Russia’s decade-long invasion of Afghanistan. Abdul has choreographed a gathering of young boys who stuff the wreckage with raw cotton and tie ropes to it in an attempt to make it fly like a kite. It is a disquieting scene of children at play with a historic relic of war that embodies resilience and an imagination of possibilities.
Quenton Miller, Koki, Ciao, 2025 (11 mins)
This film is an inquisitive, endearing, and illuminating biography of Koki, a 67-year-old cockatoo once kept by Yugoslav leader, Josip Broz Tito. The film documents Koki in his current caged home on Brijuni Island where other animals who were gifted to the state of Yugoslavia in acts of diplomacy still reside. Miller uses old photographs from the state archive featuring images of Tito, Koki and the many political and celebrity guests as a means of interview, jogging and testing the cockatoo’s memory and recollection of his past life as a beloved companion to a notorious dictator.
Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, Something from there, 2020 (7 mins)
This is a personal document and heartfelt conversation with the artist's parents about their homeland in Palestine, their displacement and immigration to Canada. Through this moving work Hamadeh evokes a longing for “something from there” which is never specifically named, but the artist draws out through visual fields and language. This prescient piece presents a tethering relationship to place, an embodied knowing of home, and an active hope of nearing the distance.
Jumana Manna, Wild Relatives, 2018 (64 mins)
Deep in the earth beneath the Arctic permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. In 2012 an international agricultural research center was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war, and began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Svalbard back-ups.
Anouk Verviers, The world was always full of us, 2025 (28 mins)
Part of a dystopian trilogy that examines the centuries long history of female health and misdiagnoses in a performative and speculative future set in industrial landscapes and warehouses. Verviers destabilizes the female body and the scene through movement and sculpture to introduce ‘the Apparatus’ an authoritative figure who prescribes and chronicles various medical treatments in the name of ‘the Convincings’. The ineffectiveness of these cures are captured and performed in eerie scenes and through repetitive gestures.
Films by John Akomfrah, Dana Inkster, Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Cauleen Smith
Programmed by Rinaldo Walcott
Dana Inkster, Welcome to Africville, 1999 (15 mins)
This irreverent hybrid work takes history, memory, the archive and sexuality seriously. Set in the impending ruins of Africville its mix of archival footage and fictionalized performance packs a powerful punch about what ruins can both conceal and reveal.
John Akomfrah, The Last Angel of History, 1996 (45 mins)
This film refuses genre. Nonetheless it narrates how genius arises from the supposed ruins of transatlantic slavery to provide the us a world of Black Atlantic musical forms . These musical forms bend sound, invent new sounds, and in the process reshape the human and engage in unending invention.
Cauleen Smith, H-E-L-L-O, 2019 (11min)
An homage to New Orleans this work references popular film like a musical sequence from Close Encounters of the Third Kind as it also limns the musical traditions to the city. In a post-Katrina New Orlean Smith mixes pass and present.
Tuan Andrew Nguyễn, The Boat People, 2020 (20 min)
This film blends the past and the future and what might emerge from the ruins of a past not yet behind us. The sea becomes a reservoir of the ruin of a human civilization whose history can be reconstructed from its detritus for an as yet unnamed future.
