“Seeking liberation is rebellious.”
—Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories
Last summer, I was on the train with the artist and curator Aman Sandhu, a new friend and recent collaborator, whose deep engagement with sound and the moving image inspires me. It was a beautiful ride, the kind that makes you pause, with the lush greens of July rolling past the window, everything thick with light and life. We were talking about so much, especially about dreaming, the form of dreams, and the different ways dreams reveal a coherence within fragmentation and rupture, much like the logic of Afrological improvisation that Sandhu studies. How I dream—the way dreams appear to me, and how I feel them—finds affinity with why I love experimental film. I love the way film invites us to move through disjunctions, suturing a world held together by sensations that are material and environmental while also opening us up to the workings of the imagination. Recalling this conversation with Sandhu reminds me of Sylvia Wynter’s 1967 essay “We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture,” which I recently reread during an exhibition program with Katherine McKittrick. Wynter emphasizes the physiology of writing—how it is as much of the body as it is of the mind—as a cultural act with revolutionary intention. She writes, “And it was His Word, in his own mouth, fired by his own dream.” I find that experimental film functions similarly, in that the physical composition of images invites us to sit within a dream form.
These thoughts about the relationship between the dreamworld and the possibilities of experimental film grounded the thinking that led to Open Secret: Screenings, Conversations + Workshops, a film series I designed at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario, where I am associate curator of academic outreach and community engagement. The title draws from Fred Moten’s idea “that poetry investigates new ways for people to get together and do things in the open, in secret.” This double maneuver of transparency and opacity speaks directly to the ways experimental film invites collective witnessing without requiring that the filmmaker provide full access. This duality also led me to a model for curating that doesn’t rely on explanation but attunement—on trust, on presence, on what might be shared without being spoken, on the possibilities inherent in breaking from conventional forms to invent new ones. Experimental film invites us to think through what form can do: how form can release an image, and how that release can transpire into a feeling never felt before. And, for me, curation is not about abstract conceptualization, developing an authorial voice, or controlling content, but about creating conditions for collective study—conditions that remain flexible, in motion, and insistently shaped by the urgencies of the present.
Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s screening of Celaje (2020) at Open Secret. Photograph by Garrett Elliott. Courtesy Nasrin Himada.
The materiality of images—how they can seem textured, the way each frame is composed, whether they were shot digitally or on 16mm—compels us to experience the kind of dualities that define our lived reality but are often hard to put words to, such as movement and rhythm, tension and expanse, refrain and return. The sensations of time stretching and collapsing, or of moments layering beyond linear logic evoke something close to how we dream; they offer a rupture. In that rupture, we experience what lies beyond the constraints of the everyday. It allows us to break out of the world that we’re otherwise tethered to. Not to escape it, but to remember that we are able to feel possibility, and that liberation already exists within us and alongside us. Liberation is a presence that can fire up our dreams while we are together, sitting around a fire.
Open Secret began in 2023 and continued through the spring of 2025, and it was formulated to build on past and present discourses around diaspora, return, and collective anti-colonial struggles. As I think back on the experience, I begin to have a clearer sense of how I think of film programming. I want to reflect on how this programming practice foregrounds a filmmaker’s process—what it takes to make a film, and how we then experience it. For me, these questions have always been crucial: How do we learn from the films and the filmmakers themselves? How do we imagine teaching and learning through these works? What are the pedagogical possibilities that emerge when a program is curated with attention to rhythm, composition, and contextualization? In retrospect, I see how dreaming was always part of my logic. I believe that collectively experiencing experimental film and engaging the process of its making can bring us closer to that feeling that precedes language, that dream form in which possibility has not yet been limited by disciplines, categories, and definitions.
Razan AlSalah, A Stone’s Throw, 2024 (still). Courtesy the artist.
Rather than centering a singular voice or theme, the series was designed to bring diverse artistic practices into dialogue across diasporic, Indigenous, and trans-geographical contexts. Each iteration of Open Secret included multiple artists who would screen their films at the Screening Room, an indie cinema in downtown Kingston. Guest curators were invited to collaborate on the screenings, conversations, and workshops, bringing additional perspectives to the curatorial process, while university students participated in discussions around the films. By privileging multiple perspectives and modes of working, this structure allowed for intimate, deep engagement and exploration of the moving image as a method for collective learning, listening, experimentation, and solidarity-building. It also made room for each program to evolve as needed to respond to the ongoing genocide in Gaza and engage with and stand in solidarity with Palestine.
Getting people into the cinema to watch experimental film is a challenging endeavor, especially within the context of a university campus where experimental film is still often considered inaccessible and less appealing to a broader student population. This means that filmmakers taking exploratory approaches to nonfiction and expanded documentary rarely get sustained engagement in the spaces that need their perspectives most. I focused on filmmakers who are artists and artists who make films, because collectively they so often value collaboration and process. They are also deeply invested in material considerations of images: their physical, textural, and structural compositions. I have found that inviting audiences into conversations about filmic processes not only serves to help us engage with images and their place in the world, but it also tends to make these artworks feel more relevant to people who might otherwise find experimental film abstruse.
It wasn’t until I had a conversation in December 2024 with Montreal-based filmmaker Razan AlSalah that I found the language for what I had been working on for more than a year. Open Secret featured AlSalah’s award-winning film, A Stone’s Throw (2024), about Amine, an exiled Palestinian elder who is also the artist’s father, and whose search for work and refuge reveals the correlation between resource extraction and the colonization of Palestine. AlSalah shared that she couldn’t think about the material of film—which in her case involves blown-out archival photographs, satellite imagery, digital coding, phytograms, and images superimposed on one another—without also thinking about what it means to return to the immaterial, to the ghosts, to our ancestors, and to the dreams that sustain us. AlSalah spoke movingly about the necessity of listening and about how, in filming her father recount histories of resistance and life in Palestine, the work demanded more than simply picking up the camera. It required a profound engagement with presence, voice, and the ethical demands of how one listens. This way of thinking resonates with a necessary maneuver for us Palestinians: we hold the material and immaterial together—our love for our land and our steadfast desire to return to itas a relational and revolutionary intention. Our conversation helped me understand that the way I’ve been thinking about and engaging in film programming for the last twenty years is deeply connected to this relation between the material and immaterial.
The structure of Open Secret was intentionally iterative, with each edition evolving in relation to the last, expanding on the questions of process, image-making, archival research, and pedagogy. In the first season, four artists—Parastoo Anoushahpour, Kriss Li, Sharlene Bamboat, and Sofía Gallisá Muriente—presented recent films followed by conversations. I had been thinking about how these artists grappled with intimacy and encounters, yet the screenings went further, exploring themes of translation, desire, dispersion, and impermanence. For instance, Bamboat’s film If from Every Tongue It Drips (2021) is a poetic and lyrical exploration of distance and intimacy through two queer women who navigate their personal and political histories. The film was made across three locations: Montreal; Batticaloa, Sri Lanka; and the Isle of Skye, Scotland. The day after each screening, artists led a workshop with students. Li, for example, drew on the kind of science-fiction scenarios they explore in their own films to initiate discussion of the carceral system, inviting participants to map out power structures typically rendered invisible and to envision a future without prisons. Together, the screenings and workshops expanded our understanding of the diasporic image.
I had learned how to think about diasporic movements in this iterative, collaborative way in part through my own ongoing writing project, For Many Returns. Like the film series, it has been a way to consider diasporic experiences from my own Palestinian perspective. For Many Returns began as a practice of art writing as a relational act rooted in love. I would write to reveal my own thinking and process, including my moments of writer’s block, responding to artworks as I experienced them and acknowledging the way my own background and personal relationships shaped my responses. I considered this method of writing a kind of dream form. Throughout this project, as I wrote about artists I loved whose work showed me what an anti-colonial practice looked like, I contemplated the right of return for myself and others. I was often asking: What kind of time frame constitutes a return? How does it unsettle colonial narratives and engage with expressions of nonbelonging? If return informs how we carry and translate our love for our lands through our relationships and through our anti-colonial work, then how does it expand the notion of solidarity? The screenings further opened up my understanding of return: the films themselves, and the conversations they generated, helped me remember that return is not only necessary, it is an ethical position rooted in anti-colonial histories of culture and knowledge driven by Palestinian resistance, and oriented around the relation between heart and mind, love and liberation, art and life.
Razan AlSalah, A Stone’s Throw, 2024 (still). Courtesy the artist.
Of course, it’s obvious that watching films or programming screenings is not enough. I’ve been thinking even more urgently about the relationship between the Palestinian diaspora, Palestinians in Palestine, and all Indigenous peoples living on their lands, fighting for them—not only through protest and mourning, but through the form, rhythm, and vision of solidarity-building. The moving image becomes a terrain for holding these temporalities and struggles in ways that connect them. For instance, Nataleah Hunter-Young guest-curated a screening of Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019), which follows an eighty-year-old widow who rediscovers her will to live and ignites a collective spirit of defiance when her village faces forced resettlement. Films like this make space for grief and love, ancestral memory, and narratives of resurgence that inspire camaraderie across internationalist movements. Each moving-image work holds a story or many stories that have the possibility to connect to diverse histories of dispossession and displacement. Gathering together has become even more crucial so that these stories can be shared: screenings like these are spaces where the possibility of thinking and feeling collectively can be held and nurtured.
The second iteration of Open Secret extended this structure of screenings and workshops, inviting audiences to engage even more fully with the archive through films that explored diasporic memory, ancestral lands, and hauntological architectures. Sandhu curated a screening and workshop that centered on searching through familial and cultural archives. He showed Alia Syed’s video diary in which she features footage from a Hi8 video her father shot in 1995, as well as Matthew Arthur Williams’s video that uses footage from the Stoke-on-Trent City Archives to piece together a story about the Caribbean community in Staffordshire to which his family belongs. The films that Sandhu presented collectively asked what emerges in the gaps, ruptures, and hauntings of found materials and sound. Memory Keeper, a screening curated by Jennifer Smith, featured multiple films by Jennifer Dysart, an artist who has spent the past two decades making films, based on thorough archival research, that reassert Indigenous presence in historical records and memory. Across these events, the archive became a site of both inheritance and invention.
From the start, my aim was not to search for answers but to engage more deeply with questions I had been asking through a process-based and collaborative framework. I asked what we might learn from an artist’s process until, as the program evolved, I began to also ask how we might make those processes legible and translatable for those who encounter them.
This legibility became even more urgent in the third iteration of screenings and conversations, which centered on what images can do in the context of the ongoing live-streamed genocide in Palestine. This iteration grappled with dispossession, the entanglement of love and grief, and the enduring commitment to protecting our lands. One program that stood out in particular was Home is a thing we are always giving away, which was curated by film programmer Inney Prakash. It featured short films that navigate the distances and dissonances living beings have in relation to their ancestral homelands, including Lindsay McIntyre’s Tukuit (2025), which explores how the drawing of Canada’s borders affects caribou and lichen. Other films took Palestine, Algeria, Haiti, and China as their subjects, and, to quote Prakash, showed how “the faint contours of nation-states dissolve under vivid 16mm layers of memory and imagination.” A program like Open Secret aims to expand how we understand diaspora today and create space to work through what’s happening in the present, as so many of us have done before and since October 7, 2023.
Looking back, I understand Open Secret as both a model of a curatorial method and an ongoing gesture. My intention was to allow the process itself to guide us: to let the films, conversations, and encounters shape what becomes possible.
