Film Categories: Memory

  • Moun an ba la: French Caribbean Diaspora in Toronto

    MOUN AN BA LA: French Caribbean Diaspora in Toronto is an ode to bicultural identity and an exploration of the collective memory of the French Antilles community in Toronto through the slice of life of an Afro-French & Canadian woman of Martiniquan heritage. Hybrid in its form, the film, which sits at the junction of direct cinema and poetic documentary, explores the question: “To which culture do I belong?” as it takes a look at the complexity of bicultural Afro-French & Caribbean identity. In the film, we witness an intimate conversation between a francophone Toronto-based Paris-born mother-to-be of Martiniquan heritage…

  • Momently Gone

    Momently Gone is a dive into the interiority, in the form of five video-poems, declining, like a theme with variations, the relationship to our missing ones. It was inspired by the mourning of two of my sisters, both of whom committed suicide, and that of my father, who died of cancer. This common thread gave birth to a set of works that is soothing rather than challenging, because there is sweetness in feeling close to those who are absent, there is sweetness in gathering around a universal reality. Thanks to digital tools, I work with layers of images and sound…

  • Before Me

    An incomplete family story leads the filmmaker on a quest to find her mother in the British archives. The discovery of a photograph unearths a story of upheaval, desolation, and ultimately, transformation. A lament for a mother whose life was lost, then found, in the dust of the archive.

  • Bye Bye Now

    When people wave hello to the person behind the camera in home movies they seem aware of waving hello to a future viewer. Yet, upon viewing, the very gesture (re)presents a recurring good-bye to a fleeting moment. This film is an homage to the man behind the camera in these personal 8mm family archives, my father, who left me this heritage beyond mortality in the traces of past lives. — Louise Bourque Review : “BYE BYE NOW is cruel. A movie traumatized by time, which is the passing of time and all that inhabits it. Movies play into that, their…

  • Traces / آثار

    In the midst of the rubble of a torn building, a reel of film. An unlikely unraveling of queer bodies taking shape and form, while the war-torn city around and its spectacle of toxic masculinity glitches and disintegrates.

  • processing…cleaning…refreshing…

    a depiction of an individual going through a phase in their life, they are navigating what constantly shifts inwards and outwards.

  • After Bed

    Pulsing flashbacks from the summer of love reawaken a queer California classic.

  • The Translation is Approximate

    This video focuses a conversation that Naqvi witnessed between her aunt and a domestic worker over financial matters. For many reasons — the ambivalence of the situation, the respective socioeconomic positions of the two women involved in the scene, and the very nature of the recording, which careened between documentary and voyeurism — these images have long haunted Naqvi. In the Translation is Approximate (2021), Naqvi retrieves the original footage that she shot in 2013 and traces back her thoughts about what motivated her to revisit this material. This short video both provides insight into her approach and fundamentally questions…

  • Seaview

    Seaview (2015) is an experimental film which combines home video and captured footage from Karachi, Pakistan. Naqvi travels back to her family’s country of origin to compare childhood memories of this place with lived experience. In the first sequence, she shows video footage of her first trip to Clifton Beach in Karachi. The accompanying text describes her visit to the same beach seventeen years later, and the difficulties in trying to document this place, both as an image maker and as a woman. Naqvi confronts her own personal struggle of being caught between the ideals of Western and Eastern societies.…

  • i see me watching

    Based on the artist’s personal struggle with gender, i see me watching speculates on the journey to and struggle with finding identity by presenting a first-person depiction of a singular self that has been split into two. The film displays the character’s ever-changing emotions as they follow an anonymous figure through unfamiliar surroundings, and gain awareness of the figure as an integral part of their being.