July 16 | Program by Renaldo Walcott
Jul 16 2026

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Program Description

Sunset Kino is Canada's only outdoor, avant-garde film festival. Founded by Séamus Kealy in Austria in 2017. 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.

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.

Program Details

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.

About the Artists +

John Akomfrah
John Akomfrah is a hugely respected artist and filmmaker, whose works are characterised by their investigations into memory, post-colonialism, temporality and aesthetics and often explore the experiences of migrant diasporas globally. His first film, Handsworth Songs (1986) explored events surrounding the 1985 riots in Birmingham and London through a charged combination of archive footage, still photos, newly shot material and newsreel. The film won several international prizes, exhibiting in both the gallery and broadcast arena and established a multi-layered visual style that has become a recognisable motif of Akomfrah’s practice.

Dana Inkster
Dana Inkster is an Alberta-based media artist and cultural producer. Her first film, Welcome to Africville, was released in 1999 and won critical acclaim and awards in Canada and internationally. Since that time, Dana has produced and directed other short films and videos spanning the genres of experimental video art to television public service announcements. Her films and videos have been exhibited and acquired throughout Canada and around the world.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen
Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s practice explores the power of memory and its potential to act as a form of political resistance. His practice is fueled by research and a commitment to communities that have faced traumas caused by colonialism, war, and displacement. Through his continuous attempts to engage with vanishing or vanquished historical memory, Nguyễn investigates the erasures that the colonial project has brought to bear on certain parts of the world. Through collaborative endeavors with various communities throughout the world, Nguyen sets out to cultivate and empower these strategies enacted and embodied by his collaborators. Through this collaborative practice, he explores memory as a form of resistance and empowerment, emphasizing the power of storytelling as a means for healing, empathy and solidarity.

Cauleen Smith
Cauleen Smith was raised in Sacramento, California and lives in Los Angeles. Smith is faculty in the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture. Smith holds a BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater Film and Television. Smith is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a 2022 Heinz Award; Guggenheim Fellowship; Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize; Ellsworth Kelly Award; The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts; and a Rauschenberg Residency. Smithʼs works have been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; Art Institute of Chicago,Chicago, IL; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, among others. Her work is included in many public collections, such as the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Studio Museum Harlem; Smithsonian Museum of American Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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