Monitor 16: Shadows Swept Far Away

Monitor 16: Shadows Swept Far Away

Curated by Sameena Siddiqui and Vicky Moufawad-Paul

Featuring short films by Nour Bishouty, Kevin Lee Burton, Beny Kristia, Mahishaa, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, Chantal Partamian, Tripty Tamang Pakhrin, and Ankur Yadav

Toronto Premiere
Sunday, April 12, 2026
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave, Toronto, ON M5S 1J5
Doors 5:30pm; Screening 6:00pm
75min, Followed by Q&A and Reception
Get your tickets

SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) is thrilled to premiere the 16th iteration of Monitor, its longstanding experimental film and video program, in partnership with Images Festival.

This program approaches experimental cinema as a site where resistance and solidarity are not only represented but actively produced through form. Drawing on critical scholarship that situates ecology as a contested political terrain (Rob Nixon, Anna Tsing) and power as something that governs life and death (Achille Mbembe), the curators bring together eight films that reveal how states, religions, and colonial infrastructures shape bodies, land, and imagination. Non-linear montage, poetic language, and attention to non-human actors disrupt the authority of official histories, replacing them with intimate, fractured, and plural ways of knowing.

Hotels, urban streetcorners, sacred landscapes, and even domestic spaces become politicized witnesses—sites where extraction, displacement, nationalism, and authoritarian control leave their marks, but where care, labour, and memory also persist. By centering Indigenous, Dalit, diasporic, and subaltern perspectives, the program insists that resistance is not a spectacle but often takes subtle forms: tactile engagement with land, poetic refusal, archival re-stitching, and the reclaiming of ecological and bodily knowledge erased by colonial and state power.

In a time of global turmoil, environmental crisis, and intensifying border regimes, the works in Shadows Swept Far Away mobilize cinema as a practice of solidarity. Experimental form becomes a decolonial gesture, transforming attention, slowness, and fragility into political acts that imagine futures beyond domination, extraction, and dispossession.

Artist and curator bios, and film synopses.

Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible venue. Closed captioning on all films.

About the Films:

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh
we would be freer (بنكون اكتر احرار)
2023, 8:41 | Palestine

Nour Bishouty
On the count of three
2024, 13:20 | Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Canada

Tripty Tamang Pakhrin
Welcome to Hotel Thai
2024, 12:05 | Nepal, Hawai’i

Ankur Yadav
‘एक पुराना’ (The Old One)
2023, 10:13 | India

Kevin Lee Burton
HOMe
2024, 02:54 | God’s Lake First Nation

Beny Kristia
When The Blues Goes Marching In
2025, 12:40 | Indonesia

Mahishaa
Babasaheb In Bengaluru
2024, 4:46 | India

Chantal Partamian
Traces / آثار
2023, 8:45 | Canada

SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) is an artist-run centre in Canada staffed by people of colour, committed to support the work of artists of colour. SAVAC has engaged an international community of artists, curators, and audiences through Monitor since 2005. 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.

Images Festival is a non-profit, artist-led festival dedicated to experimental film, media arts, contemporary art, and the spaces in which these forms coexist.

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SAVAC acknowledges the support of its funders and programming partners.