My Lovely Lunarite

Presented by the Images Festival
Co-presented by SAVAC, aluCine Latin Film + Media Arts Festival, Sanghum Film Series and Sur Gallery
Watch via Live Stream

A “lunarite” refers to the rocks that make up bright portions of the moon’s surface: large, luminescent craters that encroach upon darker plains. It is a critical mass of substance, overflowing, engulfing. Tangible yet out of terrestrial reach, the lunarite reminds you of your smallness; that you cannot—not typically, or with ease, at least—be flown to the moon.

So, instead of fantasizing about a lunar visit, why don’t you invite the lunarite home?

Bear in mind: this visitation will carry the weight of collapse; your lunarite may, at first, be aggressive—shards piercing the Earth, shattering—then slowly distilling, with parts crystallizing.

Your lunarite will overspill like leakage, traversing landscape: from desert to seabed, horizon to ocean floor, trailing the shoreline into the house by the lake, from a room with a view to the kitchen sink—cloudy blue in hue, milky pallor, soaking wet.
—Aaditya Aggarwal

This opening work in this program contains flickering and strobing.

Danzas Lunares (Lunar Dances)
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos
MEXICO, 2020, 16MM>DIGITAL, 9 MIN, NO DIALOGUE
A brief glimpse of the cycles of Coyolxauhqui, the moon goddess. Her cycles used to be a dance.

21 Chitrakoot
Shambhavi Kaul
INDIA, 2012, DIGITAL, 9 MIN, 
NO DIALOGUE
Land, as ancient and ideal as nature, is called up through the chroma-key backdrops of one of the world’s most viewed mythological television series. Spectacular images spring forth from a glorious, more magical time. But, as nostalgia turns into melancholia, hostility is the inevitable result. There is no option but a war to destroy everything, after which trace impulses toward a narrative are the last surviving markers of the material past.

Dopahar Ke Badal (Afternoon Clouds)
Payal S Kapadia
INDIA, 2017, DIGITAL, 13 MIN, ENGLISH/HINDI/NEPALI
Kaki is a 70-year-old widow who lives with her Nepali domestic help Malti in Bombay, India. It is afternoon in their house, where a flower blossoms in the balcony. Malti meets a boy (a sailor) from her hometown unexpectedly. Meanwhile, men in the passage spray mosquito repellant that gives Kaki bad dreams.

Desert Islands
Ralitsa Doncheva
CANADA/BULGARIA, 2019, 16MM>DIGITAL, 11 MIN, ENGLISH/BULGARIAN
An impressionistic journey following the filmmaker and her father as they travel to the Black Sea in Bulgaria. If one were on a desert island, what would one bring? What, precisely, would one choose? “There is no light.”

When the moon suddenly appeared at Kata Tjuta
Belinda Davis
AUSTRALIA, 2019, DIGITAL, 4 MIN, NO DIALOGUE
Light and shadow, colour and line on the rock formations of Kata Tjuta in the central desert of Australia. Anangu land. And then the moon appeared.

Mãe D’Água
Lorena Pazzanese (Lou Pipa), Esther Az, and Bárbara Carnielli 
BRAZIL, 2019, DIGITAL, 3 MIN, PORTUGUESE 
Mãe D ́Água, which means “Mother from Water”, is a music video made as an all- women collective creation by Lou Pipa, Esther Az, and Bárbara Carnielle, during an art residency in a Zen Monastery called Morro da Vargem, in Ibiraçu, Espirito Santo, Brazil. The song evokes Iara, a mermaid from Indigenous Brazilian folklore who lives in the rivers, calling her healing cure by voice.

Celestial Vault
August Fröhls (Swapnaa Tamhane + Aman Sandhu)
CANADA/SCOTLAND, 2019, DIGITAL, 8 MIN, ENGLISH
A collage of syncopated hand gestures and vocal exercises by cult-figure Asha Puthli in her response to a James Turrell sculpture. Puthli recalls a memory of a week-long fast and meditation in which she herself was on a brink, standing at the entrance of a vault between the material and corporeal world.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos “+300 films from 2012 the collective experiments from different documentary and cinematographic devices, digital and analog as well as interventions or appropriations from found footage that allows to demarcate the territory in which an image, being visual or sound, becomes a condition of possibility for a political art.”

August Fröhls (Aman Sandhu, Glasgow, and Swapnaa Tamhane, Montreal) have worked in collaboration since 2012. In their practice, they point towards peripheral histories to usurp institutional narratives, and hegemony. Through installations in “in-between” spaces such as shop windows or garages to organizing parasite pedagogical projects at museums, August Fröhls seek to disrupt the institution of Western art education, making, and presentation.

Bárbara Carnielli is a Capixaba artist (from Espírito Santo, Brazil). Her work navigates within the artistic field in order to strengthen the relationship with nature and our sensitive contemplative field. To her artistic process, she explores sensorial poetics as the breath of life. In addition to contemplating the power of observing everyday natural phenomena, she also addresses time, and the practice of a connection and immersion with ethereal study.

Belinda Davis (b. Lismore, Australia) is a Sydneybased filmmaker and photographer. Engaging with analogue and digital mediums, Belinda’s practice is dedicated to the investigation of landscape and the documentation of time, place and personal history in consideration of the everyday.

Esther Az, visual artist, Brazilian from the city of Contagem. Through the combination of image and word, I organize and express my greatest faith: we are alive! Most of the time, I investigate my face, following the trail of the mestizo history that composes me. Tolstoy said: “sing your village and you will sing the world”. This idea ferment everything I do: I approach atoms to say about galaxies. I make the affable my molotov.

Lorena Pazzanese, graduated in Image and Sound Design at University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her research is based on the intersection of performance with other languages, such as photography, video, painting, sound and installation. Her artwork seeks to push the limits of the image, generating sensory relations beyond the visual impulse. She presented her work in different cities in Brazil, Colombia, Argentina and Switzerland, in festivals, shows and exhibitions.

Payal S Kapadia is a Mumbai based filmmaker. Her work deals with that which is not easily visible, hidden somewhere in the folds of memory and dreams. It is between minor, ephemeral feminine gestures where she tries to find the truth that makes up her practice. Her films have shown in prestigious festivals including Cannes Cinefondation (2017), Berlinale (2018) and IDFA (2019).

Ralitsa Doncheva is a Bulgarian artist and filmmaker, currently based in Tio’tia:ke/ Montréal. Drawing on her Balkan roots and history, her films evoke shimmering worlds on the verge of disappearance. Her work has been presented internationally in film festivals, galleries, and alternative spaces. A solo program of her films has been recently exhibited at the Dazibao gallery in Montréal. In addition, her previous film, Baba Dana Talks To The Wolves, received the Eileen Maitland Award at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Shambhavi Kaul has exhibited her work worldwide at such venues as the Toronto International Film Festival, the Berlinale, the New York Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, and Experimenta Bangalore. Her work was featured in the 10th Shanghai Biennale, and she has presented solo shows at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai. She was born in Jodhpur, India, and lives in the United States where she teaches at Duke University.