Call for Submissions: MONITOR 16 Film and Video Program

SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre)

Poster design by Miao Xuan Liu with images from works by Ali Satri Efendi, Abeer Khan, Nimisha Srivastava, and Paribartana Mohanty.

Open Call: MONITOR 16

Submission Deadline: November 10, 2025

Calling all artists and filmmakers! SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) is accepting submissions for MONITOR, its longstanding experimental film and video program. The 16th iteration will be collaboratively curated by Sameena Siddiqui and Vicky Moufawad-Paul.

MONITOR presents experimental short films and videos that initiate dialogue around the shifting nature of politics, economies, and landscapes across the Global South and its diasporas. Since 2005, SAVAC has engaged an international community of artists, curators, and audiences through artists’ works that transcend languages, borders, and political divides.

Artists and filmmakers are invited to submit new, independent, and innovative works that balance aesthetic explorations with critical narratives and subject matters. We encourage artistic approaches that are creative, unconventional, and take risks in their form, content, and style.

Selected works will be screened throughout 2026 in Toronto, Canada, and internationally. Artists will receive screening fees based on payment standards set by IMAA (Independent Media Arts Alliance). Due to the high volume of submissions, only those selected will be contacted by February 2026.

Explore past editions of MONITOR.

Monitor 15: Clearings in the Fog, Struts Gallery, Sackville, 2023

Eligibility Guidelines

• Short format works only (under 20 minutes)
• Works must be produced in the last 3 years (in or after 2023)
• All submissions must be digital vimeo, youtube, or google drive links (private/password protected are accepted).
• Each artist may submit up to 2 works.
• Artists living anywhere in the world are welcome to apply.
• First-time directors are welcome.
• Collaborative projects are welcome.
• Films and videos must be independent projects. This means that you, as the artist, retain complete creative and artistic control of the project.
• Artists who screened their work in MONITOR 15 are not eligible to re-apply until MONITOR 17.

Submission Requirements

• Name, address, country, phone, email, website, instagram
• Title of work
• Year of production
• Brief synopsis of the work (75 words max)
• Detailed description of the work (250 words max)
• Brief biography of the artist (200 words max)
• Indication of whether the work has been shown in Toronto
• Video link (with password if applicable)
• Artist CV (3 pages maximum)
• 3 – 5 High-resolution production stills (jpeg or png, preferably 1920 x 1080 pixels at 72 dpi resolution or larger)

Important: Please label your CV and all stills with your last name prior to uploading.

How to Submit

Complete the submission form.

Submission Deadline: November 10, 2025

Questions?

Don’t hesitate to contact Artistic Director Abedar Kamgari at abedar@savac.net.

About the Curators

Sameena Siddiqui is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia. She examines how visual practices intersect with histories of labour, citizenship, marginalization, erasure, caste, occupation, and settler colonialism. Situated within decolonial feminisms and transnational frameworks, her research foregrounds politically engaged artistic practices that interrogate infrastructures, migration, ownership, difference, belonging, collective care, and radical imaginaries.

Vicky Moufawad-Paul is a Toronto based curator and writer. She is the Director/Curator at A Space Gallery. She situates her work in terms of curatorial praxis which simultaneously offers substantive analyses of world politics and embodies processes of enacting justice. She is interested in the ways that experiences of colonialism and complex diasporic intersectionalities can demonstrate new possibilities for transnational solidarity. Given the significant archival silences on the subject, she is particularly interested in strategies for self-determination, including opacity and refusal.

About SAVAC

SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) is a not-for-profit, artist-run centre in Canada dedicated to cultivating and presenting the practices of artists of colour. We support work that (in)directly addresses the ways histories of people of colour are represented alongside the story of ongoing colonialism on Turtle Island and post-colonial histories of the Global South. These works are challenging, experimental and offer multifarious perspectives on the contemporary world.

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SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre)
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 450
Toronto, ON M5V 3A8
Canada
www.savac.net
info@savac.net
+1 416 542 1661