July 9 | Program by Séamus Kealy and Jenifer Papararo
Jul 09 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 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.

About the Artists +

Lida Abdul

Lida Abdul is a performance and video artist. She and her family fled Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion of 1979, and lived as refugees in India and Germany before immigrating to the United States. Based on this experience, Abdul considers herself a nomadic artist, and her films, videos, and installations focus on themes of cultural identity, migration, deconstruction, and displacement.

Quenton Miller

Quenton Miller (b. Naarm, 1981) is an Australian/UK filmmaker and artist based in the Netherlands since 2012. He studied at Van Eyck Academy and the Master of Artistic Research programme at KABK Den Haag, where his focus on film developed out of playfully disori-entating video installations, as well as writing and designing for literary publications. He usually makes comedic work, depicting alienated characters struggling with language, truth, time and history. His work looks at diverse experiences of language and dislocating experiences of the world, often repurposing documentary and realism with frameworks and modes of address from literature, sci-fi and comedy “Although Quenton Miller’s work may seem ironic at times” one reviewer wrote “it is characterised by a romanticism and razor-sharp lightness.”

Rana Nazzal Hamandeh

Rana Nazzal Hamandeh ia a Palestinian artist and filmmaker living between Ramallah and Ottawa on unceded Anishinaabe territory. Her photography, film, and installation works look at issues related to time, space, land, and movement, offering interventions rooted in a decolonial framework. Her practice is deeply informed by the knowledge emerging from the grassroots movements for justice around me, both in Palestine and across Turtle Island.

Jumana Manna

Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores the articulations of power through the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Moving between the seemingly divergent media of film, abstract sculpture, and collage, Manna addresses how performing bodies, material fragments, and landscapes both desire and narrate pasts, presents, futures that remain excessive to the violences imposed upon them. Her recent work has dealt with the paradoxes of preservation – particularly with regards to land practices and the law – probing the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruliness of ruination, life and regeneration.

Anouk Verviers

Anouk Verviers is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, performer, and researcher living and working between London, UK, and Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal, CA. Her work explores experimental encounters between bodies and matter that reveal ways through which systems of power have sought to control marginalized bodies, while also pointing to escape routes. Her most recent work looks at the past and the future of female and non-binary bodies living with under-researched and under-recognized chronic pain. She holds a BFA from UQAM (CA) and an MFA from Goldsmiths (UK). Her work has been shown internationally. Recent and upcoming exhibitions and residencies include Taipei Artist Village (2026, TW); Manif d’art Biennial (2026, CA); Images Festival (2026, CA); MOMENTA Contemporary Art Biennial (2025, CA); Parsec (2025, IT); Cove Park (2025, UK); PRIM-Dazibao (2025, CA); and ACME (2024, UK). She is a member and initiator of the Exhausted Feminist Hybrid Species reading group and a member of the Choreographic Research Unit at Goldsmiths University (UK).

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