Metabolize the Past
Sunday, June 8 | 5:00 PM | 14A
new work by Dan Black, Samy Benammar, and Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour & Ryan Ferko.
A collection of three new films that navigate the recursive logic of memory to confront the baggage we carry. A traumatic event is recalled and feels like slipping under waves, serene and violent. The aesthetics of modern warfare, cloaked in video static, show conflict flattened into content. And in 1970, French filmmaker (and noted board game inventor) Albert Lamorisse, dies in a helicopter crash while filming a documentary about Iran. As these stories are recalled, reenacted, and replayed, we see how memories calcify into trauma, how atrocity is aestheticized, and how speculation blooms into myth.
*This program is rated 14A, and contains rapid movement and flashing light. Total runtime 62 minutes
The Muppet, dir. Dan Black
2024 | United States | 5 | video | Canadian premiere
In season two, episode two of FOX Network’s Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test, Tara Reid is plunged into freezing water and asked to remember what the acronym MUPPET stands for. JoJo Siwa, Tom Sandoval, and Blac Chyna watch. Reid fails the task. We metabolize
our horrific past into the garbage of the present.
Adieu Ugarit, dir. Samy Benammar
2024 | Canada / Algeria | 15 | 16mm on video
In 2012, Mohamed had witnessed his best friend gunned down by an armed militia on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria; the blood spilled into the lake contaminated his memory.
Lovers' Wind, dirs. Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour & Ryan Ferko
2024 | Canada / Iran | 36 | 16mm on video | Manitoban premiere
In 1970, French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse was killed when the helicopter he was filming from crashed into the newly built Karaj Dam near Tehran. While the film from his camera remained submerged for several weeks, Iran’s Ministry of Art and Culture later retrieved, processed, and eventually released these images as a posthumous addition to Lamorrisse’s ethnographic Le Vent des Amoureux (Bād-e Sabā, 1978). Nearly 40 years later, Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko’s Lovers’ Wind returns to the dam, rewinding Lamorrise’s final images to evoke a fractured, disrupted, and dislocated new voice for the fabled easterly breeze. As a filmstrip in decay slowly disentangles the filmmaker from his own aerial images, the resulting film confronts a different reality on the ground, where spatial and temporal borders inform a different kind of movement and memory.