2026 Sunset Kino Film Festival | July 9 Screening

Join us on July 9 at 9:00 PM for the second screening in our Sunset Kino film series, programmed by Séamus Kealy and Jenifer Papararo. As the sun sets over Lake Ontario, experience a curated program of films and video works by Canadian and international artists in one of Oakville’s most beautiful outdoor settings.

This year’s program and theme builds on our current exhibition,To Fall, Patiently by renowned artist Ali Cherri who explores the entangled histories of artifacts, labour, environmental transformation, and the enduring struggle for survival in the aftermath of catastrophe.

The various artists and works in this summer’s program focuses on what rises from the ruins, and includes an array of experimental video and film that shows the persistence of life through facism, occupation, war and sickness. All films are screened outdoors in Gairloch Gardens.

Please dress appropriately and bring seating and blankets. With inclement weather, screenings will be indoors in the Studio, adjacent to the Gallery.

Program Details Films by Lida Abdul, Quenton Miller, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, Jumana Manna, Anouk Verviers Programmed by Séamus Kealy and Jenifer Papararo Lida Abdul, In Transit, 2008 (5 mins) This stunning 16 mm film is centred around an abandoned Soviet military plane, the detritus of Russia’s decade-long invasion of Afghanistan.

Abdul has choreographed a gathering of young boys who stuff the wreckage with raw cotton and tie ropes to it in an attempt to make it fly like a kite. It is a disquieting scene of children at play with a historic relic of war that embodies resilience and an imagination of possibilities.

Quenton Miller, Koki, Ciao, 2025 (11 mins) This film is an inquisitive, endearing, and illuminating biography of Koki, a 67-year-old cockatoo once kept by Yugoslav leader, Josip Broz Tito.

The film documents Koki in his current caged home on Brijuni Island where other animals who were gifted to the state of Yugoslavia in acts of diplomacy still reside.

Miller uses old photographs from the state archive featuring images of Tito, Koki and the many political and celebrity guests as a means of interview, jogging and testing the cockatoo’s memory and recollection of his past life as a beloved companion to a notorious dictator.

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, Something from there, 2020 (7 mins) This is a personal document and heartfelt conversation with the artist's parents about their homeland in Palestine, their displacement and immigration to Canada.

Through this moving work Hamadeh evokes a longing for “something from there” which is never specifically named, but the artist draws out through visual fields and language. This prescient piece presents a tethering relationship to place, an embodied knowing of home, and an active hope of nearing the distance.

Jumana Manna, Wild Relatives, 2018 (64 mins) Deep in the earth beneath the Arctic permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

In 2012 an international agricultural research center was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war, and began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Svalbard back-ups.

Anouk Verviers, The world was always full of us, 2025 (28 mins) Part of a dystopian trilogy that examines the centuries long history of female health and misdiagnoses in a performative and speculative future set in industrial landscapes and warehouses.

Verviers destabilizes the female body and the scene through movement and sculpture to introduce ‘the Apparatus’ an authoritative figure who prescribes and chronicles various medical treatments in the name of ‘the Convincings’.

The ineffectiveness of these cures are captured and performed in eerie scenes and through repetitive gestures.

Oakville Galleries operates with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario and the Corporation of the Town of Oakville, along with our many individual, corporate, and foundation partners.

Image: Film still from The world was always full of us, Anouk Verviers, 2025. Image Courtesy of the artist.