Seventh Cinema → Perhaps She Comes From/To_Alang and Finlandia

We are pleased to introduce Seventh Cinema, a free public cinema season spanning seven weeks.

Teaming up with guest artist Kori Miles, we have curated a series of film programs on a temporary outdoor cinema on the gallery's adjacent lawn. This inaugural season is dedicated to exploring the intersections of neo/colonialism and global climate change, zooming in on global colonial expansion and its persistent effects on the environment, human rights, and cultural landscapes.

Join us for weekly film screenings where each session showcases a short film followed by a feature. Through the films that we have selected, we aim to spotlight the resilience ingrained in the struggles for self-determination within global First Nations and other hegemonised and racialised communities. Themes of storytelling, family, social justice activism, home, and transformation weave through our program, highlighting the powerful and enduring role of struggle and resistance.

Please visit our website for the full program.

꩜ ꩜ ꩜

Perhaps She Comes From/To_Alang, 2021, 11 minutes. Dir. Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos)

Perhaps, She Comes From/To ____ Alang weaves together three different narratives to re-examine queerness, gender, oral history, and displacement from land lost. The inspiration draws from the oral narrative that connects the relationship between bees and the land in the telling of the place of Temahahoi. This place, where only women and gender non-conforming people live, is fused with Ciwas's affinity to their own quiet queer body in relation to the feeling of displacement. A third story tells of a historical incident during the Japanese colonial period concerning brass pots gifted to the tribal community members by the colonizers that caused infertility amongst many Indigenous people. This work engages with environmental issues, particularly the plight of bees, by intertwining the close relationship between the imbalanced natural ecology and the quiet voices of queer bodies. Continuing and combining these oral herstories, Ciwas desires to have a specific qalang landmark, by creating a virtual land in the space of the Internet. This project embraces Ciwas's desire to connect to their ancestral land. To pin forward towards an Internet address https://raxal-mu.glitch.me that uses the Internet space to expand knowledge and connections beyond the soil and into the cloud.

Finlandia, 2021, 97 minutes. Dir. Horacio Alcalá.

In a small town outside of Oaxaca lives a group of Muxes, transgender and non-binary people, who make a living sewing and looking after their elders. Parallel to this, fashion designers in Spain plot a plan to appropriate the traditional Zapotec dress that the Muxes create. Finlandia follows the highs and the lows of the Muxes, indulging in their intoxicating 'velas' and grieving their lost loves, all in the beautiful setting of rural Mexico. But there is a restlessness in the air of the town of Juchitán de Zaragoza, one that an elder Muxe, Delirio, feels deep in her soul. As tragedy strikes, the importance of kinship and chosen family is reverberated across the town.