Presented by the Centre for Cinema Studies and Cinema Thinks the World, the Critical Thinkers Series features research talks by notable and emerging scholars in Cinema and Media Studies. Join us for the next talk in the Spring 2026 Series by Sarah Shamash, Assistant Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University.
Cross-solidarity cinema networks: From Pindorama to Palestine
Cine Kurumin, Brazil’s largest and most prestigious, Indigenous International Film Festival, is a testament to how the camera in the hands of the colonized is a tool of resistance, existence, and sovereignty. Ailton Krenak reminded the audience in the opening of Cine Kurumin 2017, that “Our fight today is to demarcate our space on the screen, when we can no longer demarcate our lands.” Palestinian filmmaker, Kamal Al Jaffari’s, A Fidai Film (2024), inserts the words “the camera of the oppressed,” in his film, tracing lineages of anti-colonial, global south epistemologies from Third cinema in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, to Paolo Freire’s pedagogies of the oppressed. As part of a politics of solidarity and kinship, Cine Kurumin 2025 featured Vibrations from Gaza (2023) by Palestinian Canadian filmmaker Rehab Nazzal; a film centering the stories of deaf children in occupied Gaza maimed by Israel’s US backed war machine. How does the camera of the oppressed test theories of representation of trauma, resistance, militancy, culture and solidarity? How are shared histories of resistance against settler colonialism visible through the camera of the oppressed? How do these expressions of solidarity between colonized peoples strengthen liberation struggles? This paper presentation will examine the programming of Palestinian cinema at Cine Kurumin 2025 with a focus on Rehab Nazzal’s film, Vibrations from Gaza, as part of an analysis of shared liberation struggles through cinemas of solidarity and liberation.
About Sarah Shamash
Sarah Shamash is an Assistant Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University. Her PhD focuses on an archive of films in Brazil known as Vídeo nas aldeias. Her artworks comprise the use of media in a wide variety formats, such as installation, documentary, photography, sound, performance, and video. Her work has been shown in curated exhibitions and film festivals internationally and has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council. Her work as an artist, researcher, educator, and programmer can be understood as interconnected and whole; they all revolve around a passion for cinema as a pluriversal art. She lives on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil Waututh First Nations in what is known as Vancouver.
This event is free and there is no need to RSVP.