Overview

Sharjah Biennial 15 Film Programme presents a weekly series of narrative, documentary and experimental moving images by participating artists and other significant filmmakers. Expanding on the Biennial’s theme, ‘Thinking Historically in the Present’, the line-up includes varied and radical imaginations of Indigenous futures as well as several subversive portrayals of resistance to the legacies of colonialism, and highlights the overall empowering nature of the filmic medium.

The programme begins with The Living and the Dead Ensemble’s Ouvertures (2020), which reflects on Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture’s legacy by following the translation of an Édouard Glissant play about him from French to Creole. Interrogating archival footage through a First Nations lens, John Harvey’s Still We Rise (2022) is a bold dive into the history of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the oldest continuing protest occupation site in the world. Never Settle: The Program (2018) by New Red Order satirises the hollow promises of decolonisation and settler remediation, while INAATE/SE/ (2016) by Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil re-imagines the Anishinaabe Seven Fires prophecy predicting First Nations people’s first contact with Europeans. Lee Kai Chung’s The Shadow Lands Yonder (2022) depicts the existential limbo of individuals inhabiting a newly created settler state in early twentieth-century Manchuria.

Screening and Booking Information

Saturday, 4 March 2023
8:30 pm

Ouvertures (2020)
Director: The Living and the Dead Ensemble
United Kingdom/France
Documentary | 132 minutes
Haitian Creole, French with English and Arabic subtitles

Thursday, 9 March 2023
8:30 pm

Still We Rise (2022)
Director: John Harvey
Australia
Documentary | 59 minutes
English with Arabic subtitles

Sunday, 19 March 2023
8:30 pm

Never Settle: The Program (2018–ongoing)
Director: New Red Order
United States
Experimental | 50 minutes
English with Arabic subtitles

Sunday, 19 March 2023
9:20 pm

INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place./it flies. falls./] (2016)
Directors: Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil
United States
Experimental | 72 minutes
English with Arabic subtitles

Saturday, 25 March 2023
9:00 pm

The Shadow Lands Yonder (2022)
Director: Lee Kai Chung
United Kingdom
Narrative | 25 minutes
Japanese with English and Arabic subtitles

Saturday, 25 March 2023
9:00 pm

Down on the Sidewalk in Waikīkī (2019)
Director: Justyn Ah Chong
United States
Narrative | 20 minutes
English with Arabic subtitles

Saturday, 1 April 2023
9:00 pm

Qallunaat! Why White People Are Funny (2006)
Director: Mark Sandiford
Canada
Documentary | 52 minutes
English and Inuktitut with Arabic subtitles

Saturday, 1 April 2023
9:55 pm

Self Government, Talk About It... (1994)
Directors: Aboriginal Film & Video Art Alliance
Canada
Experimental | 11 minutes
English and Cree with English and Arabic subtitles

Saturday, 1 April 2023
10:05 pm

Of Ravens and Children (2015)
Director: Marie-Hèléne Cousineau
Canada
Documentary | 31 minutes
English and Inuktitut with English and Arabic subtitles

Saturday, 1 April 2023
10:35 pm

Out in the Cold (2008)
Directors: Sara Abbott and Colleen Murphy
Canada
Narrative | 30 minutes
English with English and Arabic subtitles

Running from 4 March to 10 June 2023, the film screenings take place every week at Sharjah Art Foundation’s open-air Mirage City Cinema in Al Mureijah Square as well as other cinemas in Sharjah.

Film screenings are open to the public, and tickets are free.
To book your tickets, click here.