Sunset Kino
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens | June 26, 2025 – July 17, 2025
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 is "what was that." This phrase is not conveyed as a question necessarily, rather as a statement that underlines something confounding. This could be the idea of a portrait under pressure, which is thus distorted or inaccurate or conflated with a different idea. This could also be a notion of where we are going collectively once a sea change has happened. The idea of "who will I be" now that a challenging event has happened is also hinted at, as indeed is the mind's processing of what has just happened. As avant-garde cinema, the theme also self-consciously foreshadows an imaginary audience's potential response to what they just saw (when the lights come up and one is not sure what just happened). As with all of Sunset Kino's programming, this theme of "what was that" also connects to larger geopolitical shifts and resulting narratives whether expressed across borders or locally. Ultimately Sunset Kino this year asks us to ponder how we are constantly needing to shift our perception of the world, and perhaps also our role as individuals and collective society as a new global order becomes more palpable.
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 "Ilya & Emilia Kabakov: Between Heaven and Earth" (Tue-Sat 10 am -5 pm) and the commissioned installation "The Ship of Tolerance," also by the Kabakovs.
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.
Each Sunset Kino evening, artist Faisal Anwar presents tailored projections ahead of the curated program.
June 26: In-between
July 3: Odd encounter
July 10: Not That, But Almost
July 17: Living in a moment
"Live visuals stretch and collapse.
Sounds swell, distort, then vanish.
This is not a story. It’s a state.
A rhythm just outside of recognition.
A visual [sound] like language that speaks in fragments, silence, and sudden bursts of colour.
A portal
Come if you’re curious, stay if you’re drawn to the things we almost remember."
Film by Niels-Christian Bolbrinker, Dr. Kerstin Stutterheim
Programmed by Emilia Kabakov
Flies and Angels , 2008, 92 minutes
Ilya Kabakov was born in the Ukraine in 1933. Today he is considered one of the most important contemporary artists worldwide, and there is practically no significant museum of contemporary art around the world that doesn't show at least one of his installations. With his etchings, paintings and particularly with these installations he has for decades now created a phantastic world that serves as a counterpoint to the brutal reality and its many failed visions. These installations, executed with exquisite detail, are strange and enchanted spaces. They are like film sets telling life histories, touching emotions and memories held by people everywhere. But his stories are more than personal dramas: Kabakov is one of the last great utopists, he looks disenchantedly at the debris of the 20th century but at the same time, with human warmth and a distinct imagination, he is able to envision other worlds.
Films by Maryam Samadi (IR), Rouzbeh Akhbari (IR), Shadi Harouni (IR/US), & Khashayar Javanmardi(CH)
Programmed by Ala Roushan (CA)
Salt Sellers, Maryam Samadi, 2023, 14 minutes
A pregnant woman who lives and sells salt with her husband by Lake Urmia; is facing the risk of miscarriage because of the impact of salt storms caused by climate change and human factors. They plan to move to the city after selling their property, and until then, the woman tries to protect her fetus from the dangers of the environment.
Prizes From Fairyland, Rouzbeh Akhbari, 2018, 7 minutes
"Prizes From Fairyland" was filmed around an active oil well in the suburbs of Ahvaz, Iran. It is a five act chronicle that was performed without a pre-planned schedule for passers-by going to and from the oil and gas extraction and refinery facilities. The sequences re-animate historical colonial and technical drawings, as well as photographic documentations produced during the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s (now BP) presence in these landscapes. The narratives begin by an imaginary tea ceremony between the Shah of Persia and William Knox D’Arcy in 1901, facilitated by contemporary oilmen. It continues to depict the indigenous Bakhtiari garment pattern that later became known as the signature uniform for British-backed local militias referred to as the “Pipeline Guardians.” It follows with appropriating drawings relating to militarized smoke-generators and oil-denial schemes produced by colonial reconnaissance officers and decoy specialists.
The video work, produced in collaboration with Amin Roshan, brings attention to the visual modes of rebranding associated with the moment of post-colonial oil nationalization in Iran, by re-enacting the historic image of swapping the oil company’s name tag on the British and Iranian headquarters, in addition to reworking Bakhtiari carpets into historic oil tanker flags before and after nationalization. In the context of this exhibition, the video is presented inside a scale model of Abadan's infamous cinema Taj, and in conversation with two lenticular prints and a novela that situates the works in connection to the serpentine history of hydrocarbons in southern Iran.
I Dream the Mountain is Still Whole, Shadi Harouni, 2017, 17 minutes
Set against a stone quarry on the far outskirts of the city of Bijar, Kurdistan province, Shadi Harouni’s I Dream the Mountain is Still Whole (2017), is an intimate conversation with a former Kurdish political activist that transcends temporal specificity. Revealing the evolution of his own political and societal beliefs in parallel to the many arduous jobs he has labored, the former revolutionary furthermore challenges listeners to question humanity's larger existential struggles in relation to nature and the universe. Harouni’s film anchors the concerns reflected in the works of the other filmmakers in this program.
Caspian Sea, Khashayar Javanmardi, 2025
Khashayar Javanmardi, born in 1991, is a Persian Non-Fiction photographer. Javanmardi’s poetic depictions of the Caspian Sea reflect his own upbringings along its shorelines, the urgent pressure of climate change and environmental degradation on this important body of water, and the lives that persist on its banks. Javanmardi’s sympathetic documentary voice captures both the mystery and poetry of the Iranian coastline, but also the stark contrast of pollution and destruction of the natural environment. Being made to leave Iran, Javamardi’s Caspian work also speaks of the contradictions of his homeland. Javanmardi is now based in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Films by Rabih Mroué
Program details coming soon!
Films by Renee Helena Browne
Program details coming soon!
