Shadows on the Globe (shorts program) | Experimental Film Lab

Shadows on the Globe: 
A program of short films at the intersection of geopolitics and geology

Presented by the Experimental Film Lab at the Franklin Humanities Institute 
and Screen/Society
 

And still, it remains
(Turab Shah & Arwa Aburawa, 2023, 28 min, Algeria/UK, 28 min, DCP)

And still, it remains tells the story of Mertoutek, a village nestled in the Hoggar Mountains of Algeria’s Southern Sahara and home to the Escamaran community of Black Algerians. Surrounded by ancient rock art, the area was also the site of French nuclear bombs between 1961-66 and continues to suffer the consequences of radioactive fallout circulating in the water and soil. Summoning the landscape as a witness and protagonist; experiences of French nuclear experiments, faith and justice are narrated by the voices of multiple residents. By affording the residents distance from the lens, the film also pushes against forms of visual capture that reproduce a colonial gaze and challenges visibility as the currency for political redress. Winds migrating across the Sahara have recently carried sand containing nuclear remains back to France – a reminder that the environmental afterlives of colonialism cannot be contained or forgotten.
 

An Aviation Field
(Joana Pimenta, 2016, 14 min, Portugal, Digital)

An airfield in a suburb. The lake under the city burns the streets. Mountains throw rock into gardens. In the crater of a volcano in Fogo, a Brazilian model city is erected and then dissolved. Two individuals stand in this landscape, fifty years apart.

One of the more recent works to have emerged from Harvard’s groundbreaking Sensory Ethnography Lab—the collective behind documentaries like Leviathan, Sweetgrass and Manakamana—Joana Pimenta’s mesmerizing short film is a ghost story about buried cities, lost civilizations and Western colonialism.
 

Altiplano 
(Malena Szlam, 2018, 16 min, Canada/Chile/Argentina, 35mm)

Filmed in the Andean Mountains in the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymara, and Calchaquí-Diaguita in Northern Chile and Northwest Argentina, Altiplano takes place within a geological universe of ancestral salt flats, volcanic deserts, and coloured lakes. Fusing earth with sky, day with night, heartbeat with mountain, and mineral with iridescent cloud, Altiplano reveals a vibrating landscape in which a bright blue sun forever threatens to eclipse a blood-red moon.

"Malena Szlam’s Altiplano ranks among the most striking landscape films of recent years and, indeed, calls for a revision of how we talk about landscape in cinema." – Dan Sullivan, Film Comment 

The Experimental Film Lab (EFL) is a group of projects aimed at redefining and broadening the contemporary discourse around "experimental film" by addressing academic biases, fostering inclusion and diversity, and expanding the conversation through a conference, podcast, website, screenings, and an archival project focused on African American cinema. EFL's screening series presents films that use experimentation as a method for improvisation, political friction, and playful disruption. These works resist fixed meanings, push boundaries through unpredictability, and present us with the possibility of something yet to come.

EFL's co-directors are:
Shambhavi Kaul, Associate Professor of the Practice of Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Franklin Cason, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Art, Art History & Visual Studies

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Screen/Society screenings are free and open to the public.

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