Screening & Talkback with Helen Lee, Christene Browne, and Rolla Tahir
Saturday, March 15 2025, 5pm
CineCycle, 129 Spadina Ave., Toronto, ON M5A 1J7
Free
Join us on March 15, 2025 for the presentation of "Airplane Confessional," a program curated by A/CA Artist in Residence and CFMDC's Programs and Collections Coordinator Aaditya Aggarwal.
In these diaristic travelogues, homegoing is a hazard, its cadence a pilgrimage, its carriage a womb. A skyward passenger becomes a somnambulistic protagonist. A foreigner periodically levitates in avian suspension, then sinks into fluvial submergence. A returnee first avoids the airport, then promptly decides to leave. A narrator captures images while in transit, harnessing filial kinship with the departed. Their snapshots, in the words of film essayist Chris Marker, “claim remembrance on account of their scars.” Wayfinding between cursory points of memory (departure) and epiphany (arrival), journal entries and oral retellings score aerial views of cumulus clouds and street views of gliding country. Circadian rhythms, the dirge of slumber and the rush of dawn, turn to coriolis force, voicing the migratory nocturne of a jetting layover.
With films by Jason Britski, Christene Browne, Helen Lee, Ann Marie Fleming, Charlie Egleston, Rolla Tahir, Christina Battle, and Razan AlSalah.
This project was developed with the support of Archive/Counter-Archive, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and CFMDC.
Image: Subrosa, directed by Helen Lee (2000).
Aaditya Aggarwal is a writer and film curator based in Toronto and New Delhi. Aaditya has contributed writing to outlets like C Magazine, Rungh, POV Magazine, Canadian Art, The New Inquiry, and Ethnic Aisle, and has previously worked at TIFF, Images Festival, Regent Park Film Festival, and Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival.