re:assemblage collective

― DIFFUSION 3: Future Elegy, 63' ―

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Outdoor Screening
Friday 07 August 2026 · 9:00pm screening
401 Richmond Courtyard; 401 Richmond Street W., Tkaronto

Entrance by donation at the door

Wheelchair accessible venue

Across four works, lived presence entwines delicately with the looming absence of death. Rajee Samarasinghe silently steers us into a harrowing interview with a Tamil mother whose son disappeared during Sri Lanka’s civil war. Siavash Naghshbandi quietly faces the darkness of Tehran under a bombing campaign, turning instead to the resilient slow time of his family’s daily life. Lesley Loksi Chan, in a spectral collaboration with the late Lloyd Wong, bears witness to a body dying from AIDS while stoically addressing those on the other side of the camera. Lastly, Evelyn Pakinewatik pairs images of the traditional ceremonial grounds of Nipissing First Nation with her final recorded conversation with Mi’kmaq elder Albert Ward who speaks in English before shifting, untranslated, to his mother tongue. Future Elegy meditates on the inheritance of words and images, tracing the difficulty of nurturing their meaning as they move across time.

A Flower Falling Back Into the Earth · Rajee Samarasinghe Archive of Collateral Lives · Siavash Naghshbandi Lloyd Wong, Unfinished · Lesley Loksi Chan On and On and On · Evelyn Pakinewatik

Archive of Collateral Lives

Directed by Siavash Naghshbandi
Iran · 2025 · 16'00 · SD Video to HD Video

While military campaigns target infrastructure, Archive of Collateral Lives exposes the invisible fallout, the families forced to move, the daily rhythms disrupted, the lives unaccounted for in official narratives. Through fragments of VHS footage and personal memory, the film becomes a counterarchive that preserves what war tries to erase.

Siavash Naghshbandi (b.1987), Tehran, is a multidisciplinary artist. He began his career in 2006 as a photographer. His work includes art videos, experimental shorts, collaborations with musicians and opera groups, and a recent exploration into VR and experimental documentary filmmaking. He showed his work at major venues like the Dastan Gallery, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chelsea Museum in New York, and the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh. His films have been featured in international festivals, and he earned the Jury Prize at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2021. [↗]