re:assemblage collective

― DIFFUSION 7: Acts of Recovery, 74' ―

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Indoor Screening
Sunday 10 August 2025 · 6:00pm screening
CineCycle; 129 Spadina Avenue, Tkaronto

Entrance by donation at the door

Wheelchair accessible venue

How do we unearth histories, whether familial, cultural, geopolitical? The five films in Acts of Recovery offer generous observational insights through personal stories that excavate family archives around migration; extract knowledge from local plants with a Oaxaca women’s collective; follow a Palestinian glass blower turning sand into beautiful objects; navigate daily life as artists in Gaza while subjected to genocide; and the destruction of the Indus Delta in Pakistan and how those on the river are saving sacred shrines.

Echolocation · Nadia Shihab Por Dentro Somos Color (Inside We Are Colour) · Elena Pardo You May Laugh at Me a Little (تضحك عليّ شوي) · Yuula Benivolski [Inaudible] · Ash Moniz Four Acts of Recovery · Shahana Rajani

Echolocation

Directed by Nadia Shihab
USA · 2021 · 8'00

The rain in Oakland, my grandmother's home in Baghdad, my aunts' voices on WhatsApp, my daughter learning to count to 10, my brother playing the darbuka, the cicadas in Texas, the walls of my studio, the search for new forms. -NS

Nadia Shihab is a filmmaker, artist and educator whose work emerges through processes that are relational and intergenerational. Working primarily across film and sound, her projects are shaped by an interest in feeling and form, feminist subjectivity, counter-narrative and experimentation. Her recent films include Sister Mother Lover Child, Echolocation, Amal’s Garden, and the feature-length film Jaddoland, which was awarded five festival jury awards, including the Independent Spirit “Truer than Fiction” Award and was broadcast for three seasons on US public television. She is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in the Creative Arts, a Fulbright Scholar, and was a MacDowell Colony Fellow. Her work has screened in festivals and galleries internationally, including at Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, Cairo International Film Festival, Walker Art Center, Berkeley Art Museum, Sursock Museum (Beirut), Black Star Film Festival, Images Festival, DOXA, Alchemy Film & Video Arts Festival, Camden International Film Festival, and Kasseler Dokfest. Her work has received support from the Sundance Documentary Fund, Firelight Media, AFAC, CAAM, TFI, and BAVC. Nadia’s creative practice is preceded by over a decade of work as a community practitioner, with graduate training in urban planning that grounds her creative approach within critical understandings of power, inequity and the production of space. She was raised in west Texas by immigrant parents from Iraq and Yemen and is an Assistant Professor in Film in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Her work is distributed by CFMDC, Video Out, and Grasshopper Film. [↗]