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July 2 | Ali Cherri Film Program
Jul 02 2026

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Program Description

Sunset Kino is Canada's only outdoor, avant-garde film festival. Founded by Séamus Kealy in Austria in 2017. Introduced by the programmers and commencing at sunset, audiences experience a curated program of films and videos by Canadian and international artists. 

 

This year’s program and theme builds on our current exhibition, To Fall, Patiently by renowned artist Ali Cherri who explores the entangled histories of artifacts, labour, environmental transformation, and the enduring struggle for survival in the aftermath of catastrophe. The various artists and works in this summer’s program focuses on what rises from the ruins, and includes an array of experimental video and film that shows the persistence of life through facism, occupation, war and sickness. 

 

All films are screened outdoors 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.

Program Details

Film by Ali Cherri

Programmed by Séamus Kealy

 

The Dam, 2022 (84 mins)

Sudan, near the Merowe dam. Maher works in a traditional brickyard fed by the waters of the Nile. Every evening, he secretly wanders off into the desert to build a mysterious construction made of mud. While the Sudanese people rise to claim their freedom, his creation starts to take a life of its own.

About the Artist +
Exploring different geographies of violence in his native Lebanon but also in the broader region, Ali Cherri (b. 1976, Beirut) is a Paris-based artist with three decades of artistic practice spanning across film, performance, sculpture - in terra and bronze -, drawing, and installations, interrogating the ways in which political violence disseminates into people’s bodies and the physical and cultural landscape. Shaped by the vibrant artistic scene of postwar Beirut in the 1990s, Cherri began to investigate the sensorial coproduction of reality between images of conflict, the urban fabric and his own body.


Through the moving image and the accidented journeys of cultural artifacts, the artist discovered in the visual analysis of the political construction of history, the underlying intimate relationship between narratives of cultural value, the configuration of the past and violence itself. In a series of interventions on archaeological collections, Cherri sets out to confront the traditional signifiers of value in the museum by reintroducing fragments and artifacts that had been otherwise discarded in the form of hybrid creatures that embody the history of archaeology as a tale of colonial violence.


His film tetralogy, The Disquiet (2013), The Digger (2015), The Dam (2022), and The Watchman (2023), the subject of accolades and presentations in institutions as well as film festivals, is an extended meditation on political landscapes, from Lebanon to Cyprus and Sudan, imprinted with the traces of past events. Cherri is the recipient of the Silver Lion Award at the 59th Venice Biennale. In Venice, the video installation Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022) brings together our current predicament at the intersection of ecological disaster and the search for new grand narratives.
Related Program
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June 25 | Ali Cherri Film Program
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July 9 | Program by Séamus Kealy and Jenifer Papararo

02.07.2026 


LOCATION

Gairloch Gardens
1306 Lakeshore Road East
Oakville, ON L6J 1L6


START TIME

8:30 PM

 

Image:  Film still from The Dam, directed by Ali Cherri, 2022. Produced by KinoElektron.