An Evening of Short Films - FREE ADMISSION

Presented in Partnership with moCa Cleveland and FRONT

Programmed by Suneil Sanzgiri
Not Rated (total runtime 85 min.)

Faasla (Distance) (2020)
Priya Sen & Nicolás Grandi

"Faasla" (Distance) is a series of video letters composed between Nicolás Grandi in Buenos Aires and Priya Sen in New Delhi, artists and collaborators since 2011. Through the miasmas of uncertainty and the sudden reordering of their days brought on by the global pandemic of 2020, Nicolás and Priya "wrote" to each other of distances and intimacies they could no longer access, of the state of suspended freedoms, of memory, images and sensations. They recorded the present as well as spoke through their archives they had been haphazardly building over the years. The letters have been compiled into a single film – a way of looking at what was then and what is now; and the world still appears continuous despite the cracks of perception.


Congress of Idling Persons (2021)
Bassem Saad

The film features five interlocutors who play themselves and greater fictions, in the shadows of recent world-historical events. Artist and writer Bassem Saad, DJ and translator Rayyan Abdel Khalek, musical artist Sandy Chamoun, writer Islam Khatib, and organiser Mekdes YilmaÔüá examine a cartography of protest, crisis, humanitarian and mutual aid, migrant labour, and Palestinian outsider status. Punctuated by the late Arab Spring, the Black Lives Matter revolts of 2020, and the Beirut port explosion, the film weaves through transhistorical constants — from rage and mourning to spontaneity and besiegement — propelled by the speech and acts of its performers. If a group action is a riot and not a revolution, then who films it? If four is a riot, it is also a congress.

Pelourinho: They Don't Really Care About Us
Akosua Adoma Owusu

The starting point for this colorful film is a letter from scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois to the American embassy in Brazil. The fact that in 1927 it was impossible for African Americans to travel to Brazil reminds us of the inequality still faced by that country's Black inhabitants.


A Gregarious Species (2021)
Natasha Raheja

Three conflict zones plagued by transboundary infestations, destruction, and instability. Struggling with ISIS, locusts, and diamond mining, protagonists contemplate the impossible thought of turning their backs on their homes, now changed forever. These are stories of anthropomorphized xenophobia, familial loss, resilience, and reconstruction.

Bringing together mobile phone videos of transboundary gregarious locust swarms, political rallies, and scientific webinars, this found-footage, experimental video raises questions about the selective porosity of borders amidst environmental crisis, farmer insecurity, and nationalism in South Asia.


Spit on the Broom (2019)
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich

Spit on the Broom is a surrealist documentary that explores the margins of the history of the African American women's group the United Order of Tents, a clandestine organization of black women organized in the 1840s during the height of the Underground Railroad.

The film uses excerpts from the public record, newspaper articles related to the Tents from over the course of 100 years, and a visual tapestry of fable and myth as a way to introduce a history that remains secret.

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