The screening brings together five experimental films and videos by artists and collectives working across South Asia, Australia, and the Americas. Blending non-fictional forms with performance, mythology, and media poetics, the works engage urgent questions around ecology, ancestral knowledge, and Indigenous worldviews. From the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya to the Dakota plains, and from Guaraní myth to postcolonial landscapes poisoned by extraction, each film traces the entanglements of land, identity, and survival. Working in modes that hover between documentary and fiction, testimony and dream, the artists challenge dominant visual grammars and invite us to imagine other ways of seeing, sensing, and inhabiting the world.
This program is part of EMAMI ART Experimental Film Festival 2025 and KADIST’s ongoing international program Double Takes, which activates film and video works through physical and online presentations at partner institutions and on KADIST.tv.
Ancestral Echoes
by Fileona Dkhar
14:15 min
2022
Landscapes are legacies of the places we inherit as home. An Indigenous Khasi voice, Fileona Dkhar speaks about the Khasi Hill tracks of the past and the present. In the past, spirits dwelt here. In the present, there are ancestral echoes of past beliefs and errors. For the landscape exists, cut up and burnt, as a legacy, nonetheless.
Fileona Dkharis a Khasi visual artist from Meghalaya, India. Working with themes of ecology, identity and mythology, her work desires to (borrowing words from Trinh T. Minh-ha) not “speak about” identity but to “speak nearby.” Her research involves textual and visual elements presented as performances, videos, or audiovisual installations.
Dislocation Blues
by Sky Hopinka
16:57 min
2017
Dislocation Blues is an incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections about the 2016 Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in South Dakota. Shaawan Francis Keahna recounts his experiences entering, being at, and leaving the camp and the difficulties and the reluctance in looking back with a clear and critical eye. Terry Running Wild describes what his camp is like, and what he hopes it will become.
Sky Hopinka is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, based in Brooklyn, New York. He studied and taught Chinuk Wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin, in Portland, USA. Through personal, documentary, and non-fiction forms of media, Hopinka's practice focuses on personal positions of homeland and landscape.
The Song for Peace
by Debashish Paul
3:40 min
2023
The Song for Peace calls for a world without borders, religions, or possessions, envisioning a peaceful coexistence among people. By performing in nature, Paul wishes to evoke a sense of interconnectedness and unity between humans and nature, highlighting the need for understanding, respect, and preservation. Musically incorporating natural sounds like flowing water, rustling leaves, or bird songs into the performance further emphasizes the theme of union.
Debashish Paul is a multi-disciplinary artist from West Bengal whose work explores queer identity, spirituality, and bodily autonomy within a heteronormative society. Drawing on sculpture, drawing, video, performance, and photography, Paul creates deeply introspective and ritualistic works that often engage with mythology, personal memory, and gender fluidity
Tonalli
by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos
16:20 min
2021
The ritualistic powers of cinema are activated through the ancient Náhuatl concept of the animating soul or vital force. Conjuring fire, flowers, and many moons in a frenetic and hypnotic collage on camera, the gods of creation and fertility reveal themselves and dissolve into dazzling colors and dense physical rhythms.
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos is a film collective from Tehuacán, Mexico founded in 2012 to dismantle the commercial and corporate audiovisual grammar and its embedded ideology. The collective is inspired by the historical avant-gardes and their commitment to using both form and content against alienating realities. Their methods combine digital and analog mediums, interventions on archival materials, mythology, agitprop, social protests, and documentary poetry. Their radical experimentations on documentary and cinematographic devices produce images, both visual and auditory, that are political possibilities in their own right.
The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland
by Karrabing Film Collective
26:29 min
2018
The film is a surreal, psychedelic exploration of Western toxic contamination, capitalism, and human and non-human life. Set in a poisoned land where only Aboriginals endure, it follows Aiden, an Indigenous man returned to his family after being taken for a medical experiment. Fragmented and dreamlike, the film confronts colonial violence, ecological collapse, and competing narratives of belonging, as Aiden navigates haunted landscapes, mythic beings, and the question of which lives are deemed liveable.
Karrabing Film Collective is an Indigenous media group based in Australia’s Northern Territories which was formed by approximately 30 members, most of whom are based in the Northern Territories of Australia. Initiated in 2008 as a form of grassroots activism, they approach filmmaking as a mode of self-organization and a means of investigating contemporary social conditions of inequality.
KADIST is a non-profit contemporary art organization that believes artists make an important contribution to a progressive society through their artwork, which often addresses key issues relevant to the present day. Dedicated to exhibiting the work of artists—from more than one hundred countries—represented in its collection, KADIST affirms contemporary art’s role within social discourse, and facilitates new connections across cultures. Its local hubs in Paris and San Francisco organize exhibitions, physical and online programs, and host residencies. KADIST stays apprised of developments in contemporary art via a global advisor network, and develops collaborations internationally, including with leading museums, fostering vibrant conversations about contemporary art and society.
