A Thousand Landscapes, A Thousand Bodies

Film program curated by Mira Adoumier and Nour Ouayda (The Camelia Committee)

Images Festival | Toronto | 12 – 13 April 2025

A Thousand Landscapes, A Thousand Bodies is a two-fold film program that explores the tension between the collective and the individual by looking at how landscapes and bodies interact with each other. Conceived as a diptych, these two programs bypass the difference of scale between the body and the landscape to take interest in the trajectories of contamination that puts these two entities in constant relation and negotiation.

This program was developped in the framework of Images Festival‘s Curatorial Residency 2025.

A THOUSAND LANDSCAPES

In this first program, the landscape acts as both a witness and an active participant in the layering of memory, history, and time. It emerges as a repository for individual and collective stories. A Thousand Landscapes brings together works focused  on terrains where narratives collide and unsettling experiences leave their imprint.

In Before Seriana, Samy Benammar confronts us with the hills, the skies, the trees, and the desert fauna of an estranged homeland, scrutinizing a landscape that became familiar through the eyes of those that violated it. Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado’s Bloom follows the trace of a fleeting island that seems to refuse to be mapped or recorded, revealing geographies that simultaneously enchant and consume. The third film of the program, Le disque de poussière by Charline Dally, invites viewers to investigate meteorite particles to identify crater impacts, only to discover that by merely observing this miniscule landscape, we are erasing all the evidence it contains that could tell us its story. Finally, Jad Youssef’s Radius Catastrophe delves into the aftermath of a crime, where the land is an impossible witness to human violence and fragility.

The landscape becomes a vessel, holding clues to events both past and yet to come, while simultaneously evolving, erasing, and reshaping the traces it carries. Through the probing lens of the camera, these films transform the landscape into a dynamic space of questioning and revelation—one that challenges inherited myths and imposed narratives. The landscape becomes a site of memory and transformation, where permanence and impermanence coexist, and where the hidden layers of meaning and affect it contains are uncovered. In this interplay, the stories we tell are both shaped by and actively shape the ever-changing world around us.

Avant Seriana (Before Seriana) by Samy Benammar
Canada | 2024 | Digital | 19 min | English, French, Arabic

Mom, you brought me back to our homeland. All I know about these harsh landscapes I learned from books written by the hand that burned these mountains. I try to undo the colonial myths engraved into my memory, but the hills escape my gaze. Do you think I, too, have become the white djinn spoken of by the legends surrounding our martyrs?

Bloom by Helena Girón & Samuel M. Delgado
Spain | 2023 | 16mm to Digital | 18 min | Spanish with English subtitles

The mythical Isla de San Borondón (St. Brendan’s Isle) appears and disappears. Throughout history, it has been placed near the Canary Islands on maps. The island’s legend and allure became so pervasive that expeditions were organized to discover and conquer it for three hundred years. After centuries of oblivion, it has finally been found.

Le disque de poussière (The Dust Disk) by Charline Dally
France | 2023 | 16mm to Digital | 18 min | French with English subtitles

Le disque de poussière invites us to probe tiny meteorite particles, the terrain of an intriguing investigation into the origin of stars. Their irregular morphology reveals a mineral writing that researchers attempt to decipher, until it mysteriously seems to come to life.

Radius Catastrophe by Jad Youssef
Lebanon | 2025 | Digital | 40 min | English & Arabic

Radius Catastrophe (الأرض المستباحة) follows an alien investigator sent to Earth to examine the aftermath of a complex murder. As they gather evidence and analyze the landscape, the investigation blurs the line between forensic inquiry and a deeper, unsettling mystery about the act of observation.

A THOUSAND BODIES

Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective on madness as developed in their book Anti-Oedipus, this second program explores the symptoms exhibited by the body as a response to an absence or a lack, and not as merely pathological. Here, symptoms are not failures but adaptations, offering a “sane” response to an increasingly insane world marked by the systemic violence of late capitalist societies.

From the confines of institutional walls to the precarious expanses of untethered thought, A Thousand Bodies is a film program that looks at the ways in which bodies and minds resist control and subvert hegemonic forces. It’s under the flesh where you are tender by Agnès Hayden delves into the materiality of the body, silently piercing through the opacity of the skin to uncover what lies beyond the flesh. In Gala Hernández López’s for here am i sitting on a tin can far above the world, fear, imagination, and profit converge as thousands of individuals choose to be cryogenized, awaiting better times. Martin Davalos’ The Devil’s Knee excavates undesired bodies from decaying images, revealing their stubbornness to be seen in a context that constantly seeks to erase them. 

Exit Through the Cuckoo’s Nest by Nikola Ilic offers a searing critique of systemic oppression, showing mental illness as the only way out of a compulsory military service in wartime while Sarah Ballard’s Full Out delves into the transformative possibilities of the body as a site of violence, inexplicable impulses, and radical change. In the final film of the program, In My Head, Irina Tempea plunges the audience into the fragmented landscape of inner turmoil shaped by a body failing due to a tentacular disease. 

Together, these works question the boundaries between reason and madness, sickness and resilience, giving voice to untold stories of bodies that endure, resist, and refuse to be silenced.

It’s under the flesh where you are tender by Agnès Hayden
Spain/Canada | 2023 | Super 8, 8mm to Digital | 2 min

It is I who drag my fingernail across the flesh, capriciously, seeking to understand what dwells beyond. How many layers until I reach the bone. How much I would have to excavate to turn around and return to the starting point. 

for here am i sitting on a tin can far above the world by Gala Hernández López
France | 2024 | Digital | 19 min | English

A woman dreams of the American cryptographer Hal Finney. A major economic crisis affects the cryptocurrency market, while tens of thousands of people are cryogenized, awaiting better times. Are they suspended or falling into the void? What strange relationship do we have with the future?

La rodilla del diablo (The Devil’s Knee) by Martin Davalos
Mexico | 2023 | 8mm to Digital | 5 min | Spanish with English subtitles

The body as an archive, memory as a witness of possible futures, the image as a will. Fragments of 8mm film that disintegrate before a body that seeks to be seen, bodies that sprout incessantly. The Devil’s Knee explores the systematic erasure of identities, a trace in the archive to question memory, non-presence.

Exit Through the Cuckoo’s Nest by Nikola Ilic
Switzerland | 2024 | Digital | 19 min | Serbian with English subtitles

This personal short documentary tells the story of a soldier who never wanted to be one. His decision to never pull a trigger led to resistance and, ultimately, military prison. Pretending to be mentally ill, he leaves the war zone and returns to Belgrade via the psychiatric hospital on the day NATO begins bombing the entire country.

Full Out by Sarah Ballard
United kingdom | 2024 | 16mm to Digital | 14 min | French with English subtitles

In 19th-century Paris at the Salpêtrière Hospital, patients were hypnotized on stage to reproduce the symptoms of hysteria for public audiences. Over a century later, high school cheerleaders are fainting en masse.

Dans ma tête (In My Head) by Irina Tempea
Canada | 2024 | 16mm to Digital | 6 min | French with English subtitles

Dans ma tête is an experimental short film about the disease I’ve had for just over seven years, multiple sclerosis. Through my magnetic resonance images, cervical slices, and jerky sounds, everyday life unfolds and life goes on. I’m fine, I’m not so fine. Today, I’m opening up about this tentacular disease. This film diary is part mourning, part sweetness.