It's under the flesh where you are tender
Agnès HaydenIt is I who drag my fingernail across the flesh, capriciously, seeking to understand what dwells beyond. How many layers until I reach the bone. How much I would have to excavate to turn around and return to the starting point.
for here am i sitting on a tin can far above the world
Gala Hernández LópezA woman dreams of the American cryptographer Hal Finney. A major economic crisis affects the cryptocurrency market, while tens of thousands of people are cryogenized, awaiting better times. Are they suspended or falling into the void? What strange relationship do we have with the future?
La rodilla del diablo (The Devil’s Knee)
Martin DavalosThe body as an archive, memory as a witness of possible futures, the image as a will. Fragments of 8mm film that disintegrate before a body that seeks to be seen, bodies that sprout incessantly. The Devil’s Knee explores the systematic erasure of identities, a trace in the archive to question memory, non-presence.
Exit Through the Cuckoo's Nest
Nikola IlicThis personal short documentary tells the story of a soldier who never wanted to be one. His decision to never pull a trigger led to resistance and, ultimately, military prison. Pretending to be mentally ill, he leaves the war zone and returns to Belgrade via the psychiatric hospital on the day NATO begins bombing the entire country.
Full Out
Sarah BallardIn 19th-century Paris at the Salpêtrière Hospital, patients were hypnotized on stage to reproduce the symptoms of hysteria for public audiences. Over a century later, high school cheerleaders are fainting en masse.
Dans ma tête (In My Head)
Irina TempeaDans ma tête is an experimental short film about the disease I've had for just over seven years, multiple sclerosis. Through my magnetic resonance images, cervical slices, and jerky sounds, everyday life unfolds and life goes on. I'm fine, I'm not so fine.
Today, I'm opening up about this tentacular disease. This film diary is part mourning, part sweetness.
A Thousand Bodies
A Thousand Landscapes, A Thousand Bodies is a two-fold film program that explores the tension between the collective and the individual by looking at how landscapes and bodies interact with each other. Conceived as a diptych, these two programs bypass the difference of scale between the body and the landscape to take interest in the trajectories of contamination that puts these two entities in constant relation and negotiation.
Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective on madness as developed in their book Anti-Oedipus, this second program explores the symptoms exhibited by the body as a response to an absence or a lack, and not as merely pathological. Here, symptoms are not failures but adaptations, offering a “sane” response to an increasingly insane world marked by the systemic violence of late capitalist societies.
From the confines of institutional walls to the precarious expanses of untethered thought, A Thousand Bodies is a film program that looks at the ways in which bodies and minds resist control and subvert hegemonic forces. It’s under the flesh where you are tender by Agnès Hayden delves into the materiality of the body, silently piercing through the opacity of the skin to uncover what lies beyond the flesh. In Gala Hernández López’s for here am i sitting on a tin can far above the world, fear, imagination, and profit converge as thousands of individuals choose to be cryogenized, awaiting better times. Martin Davalos’ The Devil’s Knee excavates undesired bodies from decaying images, revealing their stubbornness to be seen in a context that constantly seeks to erase them.
Exit Through the Cuckoo’s Nest by Nikola Ilic offers a searing critique of systemic oppression, showing mental illness as the only way out of a compulsory military service in wartime while Sarah Ballard’s Full Out delves into the transformative possibilities of the body as a site of violence, inexplicable impulses, and radical change. In the final film of the program, In My Head, Irina Tempea plunges the audience into the fragmented landscape of inner turmoil shaped by a body failing due to a tentacular disease.
Together, these works question the boundaries between reason and madness, sickness and resilience, giving voice to untold stories of bodies that endure, resist, and refuse to be silenced.
Active Listeners with HELD Agency will be present for this program.
2 Sussex Ave, Toronto, ON M5S 1J5
Sidewalk-level entrance, elevator and ramp available, door width 32 inches, no automatic doors. No accessible parking on-site. Four wheelchair accessible seats in the cinema. 15 step-free seats in row 9. Accessible gender-neutral washroom located on the 2nd and 3rd floor.
For a map to Innis Town Hall, click here
