re:assemblage collective

― DIFFUSION 3: Future Elegy, 63' ―

↓↓↓↓↓

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

A Flower Falling Back Into the Earth

Directed by Rajee Samarasinghe
Sri Lanka/USA · 2026 · 8'00 · 16mm to HD Video

This film emerged from footage originally captured for a feature documentary on enforced disappearances among Sri Lanka’s Tamil population – specifically, an interview with a mother whose son vanished in the war’s final stages. In revisiting this footage, I also revisit the challenges of representing this particular testimony, which eluded me, one that could not be fully conveyed within the framework of the original film. - RS

Rajee Samarasinghe is a Sri Lankan filmmaker and visual artist born and raised amidst the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. He received his BFA from the University of California San Diego and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Much of his work interrogates the sociopolitical landscape of Sri Lanka through the deconstruction of nonfiction modalities and the legacies of colonialism in contemporary media. His practice was born out of a desire to understand the circumstances around his childhood and often navigates the terrain of memory, migration, and impermanence.