2026 Sunset Kino Film Festival | July 16 Screening

Join us on July 16 at 9:00 PM for the second screening in our Sunset Kino film series, programmed by Renaldo Walcott. 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 John Akomfrah, Dana Inkster, Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Cauleen Smith Programmed by Rinaldo Walcott Dana Inkster, Welcome to Africville, 1999 (15 mins) This irreverent hybrid work takes history, memory, the archive and sexuality seriously.

Set in the impending ruins of Africville its mix of archival footage and fictionalized performance packs a powerful punch about what ruins can both conceal and reveal. John Akomfrah, The Last Angel of History, 1996 (45 mins) This film refuses genre.

Nonetheless it narrates how genius arises from the supposed ruins of transatlantic slavery to provide the us a world of Black Atlantic musical forms . These musical forms bend sound, invent new sounds, and in the process reshape the human and engage in unending invention.

Cauleen Smith, H-E-L-L-O, 2019 (11min) An homage to New Orleans this work references popular film like a musical sequence from Close Encounters of the Third Kind as it also limns the musical traditions to the city. In a post-Katrina New Orlean Smith mixes pass and present.

Tuan Andrew Nguyễn, The Boat People, 2020 (20 min) This film blends the past and the future and what might emerge from the ruins of a past not yet behind us. The sea becomes a reservoir of the ruin of a human civilization whose history can be reconstructed from its detritus for an as yet unnamed future. Image: 1.

Film still from Cauleen Smith, H-E-L-L-O, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

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.