Sunset Kino is Canada's only outdoor, avant-garde film festival. Founded by Séamus Kealy in Austria in 2017, this festival continues now at Oakville Galleries. Introduced by the programmers and commencing at sunset, audiences experience a curated program of films and videos by Canadian and international artists.
All films are screened outdoors at 8:30 PM in Gairloch Gardens. Please dress appropriately and bring seating and blankets. With inclement weather, screenings will be indoors in the Studio, adjacent to the Gallery.
Oakville Galleries operates with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario and the Corporation of the Town of Oakville, along with our many individual, corporate, and foundation partners.
Echoes From Distant Shores
Films by Maryam Samadi, Shadi Harouni, Rouzbeh Akhbari, and Malak Masoumi
Programmed by Ala Roushan
Set along the shores of the Great Lakes, this film program creates a visceral connection between these waters and the critical conditions confronting other major lakes across the globe: Lake Urmia and the Caspian Sea. Shaped by decades of political instability and the enduring scars of colonial histories, these environments bear the weight of both personal and collective memory. The selected films trace narratives of ecological collapse and human resilience in Iran, focusing on two extractive mining sites and two of the nation’s most significant bodies of water. These locations are not just distant geographies; they are living witnesses to the violence inflicted upon land, water, and life—echoes that reach all the way to the shores where we gather.
Salt Sellers, Maryam Samadi, 2023, 14 minutes
Salt Sellers conveys the impact of climate change at the human scale through a personal narrative set along the receding Salt-lake Urmia. A desolate landscape reveals the quiet devastation of environmental disaster and its intimate, bodily and psychological consequences.
I Dream the Mountain is Still Whole, Shadi Harouni, 2017, 17 minutes
An eroding mining pit provides the backdrop to a dialogue that explores the fragile relationship between human life and the natural world—one deeply entangled with a personal history shaped by years of political conflict.
Prizes From Fairyland, Rouzbeh Akhbari in collaboration with Amin Roshan, 2018, 10 minutes
Filmed around an active oil well in the suburbs of Ahvaz, Prizes from Fairyland stages a performance that reflects on the colonial and corporate histories of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP), and the extractive violence that has reshaped the region’s landscape.
There is Another Breath, Malak Masoumi, 2023, 5 minutes
Dedicated to “Water, Sea, and the Caspian Sea”, this short film captures both the state propaganda surrounding Iran’s northern water crisis and the mundane yet surreal moments of daily life shaped by this ongoing scarcity.
03.7.2025
LOCATION
Gairloch Gardens
1306 Lakeshore Road East
Oakville, ON L6J 1L6
START TIME
8:30 PM
Image: Still from Salt Seller, 2023, Courtesy of Maryam Samadi.
