September 21, 2016
Join us on Wednesday, September 21, at 7:30pm for the screening of INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place/it flies. falls./] by Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil, followed by Q&A with the filmmakers moderated by Christopher Green.
Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil
INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place/it flies. falls./]
71 minutes, USA/Canada, 2016
History is written by the victors, but this film reminds us that the history of the oppressed can still be saved. The Khalil brothers’ feature debut re-imagines an ancient Ojibway story, the Seven Fires Prophecy, which both predates and predicts first contact with Europeans. A kaleidoscopic experience using personal interviews, animated drawings, performance, and provocative intercutting, INAATE/SE/ transcends linear colonized history to explore how the prophecy resonates through the generations in the filmmakers’ indigenous Ojibway community of Sault Ste. Marie, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. With acute geographic specificity and grand historical scope, the film fixes its lens between the sacred and the profane to pry open the construction of contemporary indigenous identity.
Adam Shingwak Khalil (Ojibway) is a filmmaker and artist. His practice attempts to subvert traditional forms of ethnography through humor, relation, and transgression. Adam’s work has been exhibited at UnionDocs, e-flux, Maysles Cinema, Microscope Gallery (New York), Museo ExTeresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), Spektrum (Berlin), Trailer Gallery (Sweden), Carnival of eCreativity (Bombay), and Fine Art Film Festival Szolnok (Hungary). Khalil is a UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow and Gates Millennium Scholar. In 2011 he graduated from the Film and Electronic Arts program at Bard College.
Zack Khalil (Ojibway) is a filmmaker and artist from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, currently based in Brooklyn, NY. His work often explores an indigenous worldview and undermines traditional forms of historical authority through the excavation of alternative histories and the use of innovative documentary forms. He recently completed a B.A. at Bard College in the Film and Electronic Arts Department, and is a UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow and Gates Millennium Scholar.
Christopher Green is a student in the Ph.D. program in Art History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a Teaching Fellow at Baruch College whose research focuses on modern and contemporary Native American art and the pressures of the digital mode on culture and art making.. He has written for The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and Art F City, and his articles and essays have appeared in ARTMargins and exhibition catalogues by the New Museum and the Fondation Fernet Branca. He most recently contributed a text and coordinated several contributions and responses by Native American artists to The House of Dust by Alison Knowles, an exhibition of the work of Fluxus artist Alison Knowles at the James Gallery, the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is one of the co-organizers of the upcoming symposium Scales of Visibility in Global Indigenous Art in October 2016.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.