Short Films at CineCycle

Part of the exhibition
Careful Crossings

Saturday, May 3
4pm–6pm
CineCycle, 129 Spadina Ave

Please register on Eventbrite.

Join us for the first satellite film screening of the exhibition Careful Crossings, held at CineCycle, an underground cinema located down the lane behind 129 Spadina Avenue.

By centering radical political, emotional, and spiritual points of view, the artists propose that an ethos of connection can transcend the colonial logic that still persists in human movement and encounter.

L’escale (The Stopover)
Collectif Faire-Part, 2022, 14 mins.
L’escale delivers the urgent message of Congolese film collective members as they recount their terrifying experience of being interrogated and detained at their stopover in Angola. The film also advocates for the imprisoned migrants left behind. 

Le roi n’est pas mon cousin (The King is Not My Cousin)
Annabelle Aventurin, 2022, 30 mins. 
Set in Guadeloupe, the film follows the filmmaker as she interviews her grandmother, author Elzéa Foule Aventurin, about her autobiography. As with the book, the film weaves together the island’s colonial history with the family’s narrative of diaspora and emotional returns.

Promised Lands
Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, 2015, 20 mins. 
As the sun sets over a forest landscape, the voices of the artist, her uncle Patrick Wanambwa, and Theodor Hertzka—a nineteenth century Austro-Hungarian economist—emerge. Hertzka’s writing imagined a European “Freeland” in East Africa that inspired early Zionist literature promoting the occupation of Palestine. Together, the voices converge on the topics of colonization, the displacement of African peoples, and the division of African land.   

it’s real, I watched it happen
Isabel Okoro, 2023, 6 mins.
Recurring spiritual symbols in the artist’s practice, such as the shoreline and a caring community, come together in this future-oriented, rhythmic meditation on a sense of home in diaspora.  

Total runtime: 70 mins.

The event is free and open to the public. Space is limited; registration is required.

—

About the Artists

Annabelle Aventurin is a French audiovisual archivist and filmmaker known for her work preserving and distributing the founding African filmmaker Med Hondo’s archives at Ciné-Archives in Paris. Le roi n’est pas mon cousin (2022) is her first documentary essay and has been screened in over 50 film festivals around the world. The documentary responds to Karukera ensoleillée, Guadeloupe échouée (“Sunny Karukera, Stranded Guadeloupe”), an autobiography written in 1980 by Aventurin’s grandmother, Elzéa Foule Aventurin. 

Collectif Faire-Part is a collective of Belgian and Congolese filmmakers who create work about the relations between the two locales as they come to represent historical violence and future-oriented counteractions. The voices of filmmakers Paul Shemisi and Nizar Saleh are featured in L’escale as they recount the harrowing experience of their detainment on a stopover in Angola. 

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa was an artist born in Glasgow, Scotland, to Ugandan parents. Her art and writing brought together documents, photographs, and records from her work with archives, people, and landscapes. Indeed, she was a global citizen, living in Germany and working between Uganda, South Africa, England, and Norway, amongst other places, before she died in 2023. Through the impact of her work, she is remembered as a cherished archivist of Black, Pan-African, and anti-colonial history. 

Isabel Okoro is a Toronto-based visual artist originally from Lagos, Nigeria. Her work explores the ethnoscape constituted between the motherland and the diaspora, primarily through photography and film. Her ongoing world-building project envisions Eternity, a visual universe she describes as a “normatopia”—a socially constructed space where reality and utopia converge in a humanly workable balance.