re:assemblage collective

― DIFFUSION 1: Off the Record, 54' ―

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Outdoor Screening
Thursday 07 August 2025 · 9:00pm screening
401 Richmond Courtyard; 401 Richmond Street W., Tkaronto

Entrance by donation at the door

Wheelchair accessible venue

“Thank you for your solidarity.” An Indonesian garment worker directly addresses the cinema audience, at once performing the homogenizing syntax of English while casting it into meaninglessness. This program opens DIFFUSION with a series of works that trouble the notion of bearing witness. Moving across forms of testimony––archival, performance, interview––the cinema is reconfigured here as a space for anger, protest, and close listening. As the agency of using one’s own words to address structures of power is repeatedly thrown into question, the program ends beyond language and voice – in an optical trance, with a single eye staring back at us.

Thank you · belit sağ The World Doesn't End When You Do ·
marlow magdalene Once You've Shot the Gun You Can't Stop the Bullet · Jayce Salloum Mana Issa, 2024 · Elisabeth Subrin Another Other · Bex Oluwatoyin Thompson Nahual · Colectivo los Ingrávidos

Another Other

Directed by Bex Oluwatoyin Thompson
USA · 2025 · 9'00

Another Other juxtaposes the interrogations of two Black American figures by white state officials. On screen, we watch Lieutenant Smith, a police officer portrayed by Wesley Snipes in Rising Sun (1993), while we hear the voice of Claudine Gay, the 30th president of Harvard University — the first Black woman president in its 387-year history. The audio originates from the December 6, 2023 congressional hearing where Gay was accused by the U.S. government of fostering antisemitism on campus during the autumn 2023 protests against Israel’s genocide in occupied Palestine. By tailoring their speech and conforming to bureaucratic, legal codes — even when those codes engender violence and corruption — both subjects reveal themselves as collaborators with racist and antiblack systems; even as those systems attempt to chew them up and spit them out. -BOT

Bex Oluwatoyin Thompson is a Boston-based writer and educator with a filmic and sculptural practice. Her work has appeared in Boston Art Review, Boston Ujima Press, Visions du Réel Film Festival, and Documenta Madrid Film Festival. She is currently studying the theological dimensions of Black literature and film at Harvard Divinity School. [↗]