Found Futures I: Archive/Counter-Archive | Revolutionary Producer. Revolutionary Archive

10.00-11.30: Archive/Counter-Archive (A/CA): Activating Canada’s Moving Image Heritage is a seven-year researchcreation project based out of York University and codirected by Janine Marchessault and Michael Zryd. Working with over twenty archival and artist-run organizations in Canada, A/CA works to activate and preserve audiovisual archives created focusing on works by Indigenous Peoples (First Nations, Métis, Inuit), Black communities and People of Colour, women, LGBT2Q+ and immigrant communities.
Andrew Bailey discusses A/CA’s commitment to artist residencies as a form of research-creation before introducing and showing clips of short films by Jennifer Dysart and Nadine Valcin, two experimental archival filmmakers who recently completed residencies with Library and Archives Canada.

Jennifer Dysartas produced an experimental archival short film as part of a residency which she refers to an artist's statement video. REVISITING KEEWATIN (BIOPHILIA EDIT) documents the Keewatin Missions in Northern Manitoba, showing Catholic Missionary Activity with the Cree community in the 1950s.
Nadine Valcin produced as part of her residency ORIGINES, a two-channel media installation created from footage of Claude Jutra’s 1963 film À TOUT PRENDRE (Take it All), one of the first Canadian films to feature an interracial relationship. Further information about the work is available on the director’s website.

11.30-13.00: Bidayyat is a Beirut-based Syrian production hub founded in the early days of the Syrian revolution. It was founded with the intention of encouraging young people, trained in a tradition of Syrian and regional experimental documentary, to tell the stories of ordinary lives in Revolutionary Syria, using footage they shot under their own names. Bidayyat has mentored dozens of young media activists, filmmakers, and writers, helping them produce over 50 shorts, 8 feature documentaries, and over 100 online publications. A decade later, Bidayyat now shifts its perspective from revolutionary production hub to revolutionary archive. The young filmmakers exiled to and residents of Germany will be joined by Bidayyat’s founder Mohammad Ali Atassi, and two of the editors of a special issue of World Records Journal on Bidayyat, Stefan Tarnowski, and Jason Fox.