We live in the shadows of what came before–post-colonial, post-industrial, post-modern. In the midst of the “post-” prefixes inhabit our contemporary moving images, comprising a plethora of narratives—each originating from a personal world; each possessing a long history; each claiming their unique aesthetics and engagement with a broader system. 

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Our art practices, layered, unflattened, always negotiating their space, engage in constant tension with the lingering old single story: one shaped by white supremacist patriarchy. The shared desire to create a new form of cinema motivates us and our guest artists. The same starting point leads to different paths, on each of which we thrive, make homes, and ask our shared inquiry: what the moving image has been, what it has become, and what does it dare to be?

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There is no singular way to deviate. Each artist who joined us carves a path of their own, experimenting with forms and the politics of seeing. The efforts of unmaking recall Girish Shambu’s notion of the new cinephilia, which expands our understanding of cinematic pleasure to include critical engagement. “The new cinephilia,” Shambu writes, “values the aesthetic experience of cinema, but it demands more. It finds pleasure, additionally, in a deep curiosity about the world and a critical engagement with it.” [1] 

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In conversation, Alice Diop claimed that her cinematic decisions are not aesthetic but political. Based on a real trial she attended, Diop made Saint Omer (2022) with intensive fixed gazes and long-takes, almost replicating the temporality of the trial. The film arose from her daily experiences as a Black woman and a mother of a mixed-race baby. The art contains her pondering, in her words, “how one depicts Black women with all the breadth and depth of their emotions and psyche? ” [2] 

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How to respond to a history that a lot of us do not belong to?–this is the driving force behind Maryam Tafakory’s creativity. Born and raised in post-revolution Iran, Tafakory revolutionizes images because they are “defined by violence, by violence especially toward women.” [3] She lives with the aftermath of the prohibition of touch between male and female characters in Iranian cinema—the binary division, the heterosexual hegemony, and the systematic oppression of women. Yet the anger, sorrow, and grief firmly remind her that “the moment you erase something, you give it more visibility.” [3] Her found-footage avant-garde film Nazarbazi visualizes the failures of censorship. In her words, “the prohibition of touch makes everything about the touch”; [3] it can be an averted glance, a breath just held too long, a door half open. 

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Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys respond to flattened histories through satire and parafiction. When the bodies of their Indigenous ancestors were reduced to “human remains” displayed in museums, they reassembled newsreels, irritating sounds, and spinning animated skulls together in The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets (2018) to question the institutions–law, news media, museums–that systematically legitimize such violence. Beginning with a stance of “anti-ethnography,” they gradually outgrew the “anti-” prefix and began to ask if there is a term to name their decolonizing efforts without the “de-” prefix. They needed to ease the fatigue of constantly “naming a thing by what it is not.” [4] 

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On the other hand, unmaking can be as lively as a caring gaze cast toward the ocean. In the film Drift (2017), Helena Wittmann invites us to watch waves attentively, until the ocean feels continental, until the nature/nurture divide dissipates in our bodies. Wittmann re-orients us toward what we perceive as “nature.” She is flowing freely across the rigid boundaries between nature and culture, between the conventions of editing and the norms of the cinematic gaze. 

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As a viewer and artist, I often ponder: is it the making of art, or unmaking of violence, that marks the beginning? Each of these artists deviate from the dominant form in their own way, and in doing so, each carry their own answers. Among the infinite answers, there is a shared sentiment: a desire to dismantle inherited structures without losing connection to where we come from. In other words, how do we balance the work of unmaking with the risk of unmooring? 

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We have inherited the terms as un-making, de-colonizing, anti-ethnography, each carrying its own tension. These terms help us define our position and make our works more legible to others, but they also impose new frames. Perhaps this is the central question we keep returning to—or the artwork itself: a careful balancing act between articulation and freedom. 

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In the end, I’d like to return to a moment during our conversations—a silence, whether in waiting for the next question or in artists’ contemplation, that ultimately led to a tender acknowledgement of the limits of language. It is the effort to express the ineffable,[5] or to witness histories that resist translation. Where words fall short, the image remains—this comforts our solitude. 

 

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REFERENCES

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[1] Shambu, Girish. “For a New Cinephilia.” Film Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 3, 2019, pp. 32–34, https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2019.72.3.32. 

[2] Diop, Alice. Personal interview. 13 March 2025.

[3] Tafakory, Maryam. Personal interview. 24 April 2025.

[4] Khalil, Adam and Polys, Jackson. Personal interview. 3 April 2025.

[5] Hopinka, Sky. Personal interview. 27 February 2025.