Join us in the backyard LEAN-TO for a night of Laura Huertas Millán’s ethnographic fictions, and Miryam Charles’ short film works that explore the popular imaginary of Haiti.

From Millán’s hallucinatory labyrinths, and compository sci-fi tactics that collapse time and space, to Charles’ mysterious and supernatural explorations of resurrection, this collection of films, wanders through stories and systems of power to confront and undo the narratives that uphold them.

Miryam Charles will be joining for a conversation remotely after the program.

A voyage into the labyrinthic memories of a Uitoto man, who worked for the drug Lords in the Colombian Amazon back in the 80s. Following his path between the forest and the ruin of a Narco ́s mansion imitating the Carrington mansion in the soap opera Dynasty, the film unfolds the hallucinatory account of a near-death experience.

Born out of an “objective hazard” (a 16mm roll where two different subjects were imprinted by mistake),jeny303 is a composite work intertwining two portraits. On the hand there is jeny, the feminine alter ego of a transgender millennial dealing with a heroine addiction. On the other hand there is the 303 building, an iconic modernist architecture in a public university in Bogota (Colombia). The images of the body and the edifice interlace and depict jeny303, a character on the threshold of a transformation to come.

A journey upstream the Amazon river where Modernist constructions have been abandoned like the memories of an engulfed civilisation of the future. A science-fiction documentary evoking the colonization of nature, former utopias in the Latin America forests and their cohabitation with the present.

Following a nuclear explosion that transforms the voice of all the inhabitants of an island, a Finnish journalist goes there in order to find a hermit with mysterious powers.

When a young girl is found off the Venezuelan coast, a medical examiner will try to determine the cause of death before the body is repatriated.

After the death of their adoptive daughter a couple goes to Haiti looking for her relatives. There, they meet with a DNA specialist who might have the power of resurrection.

A maid is suspected of murdering her former employer. Questioned by the police, she will reveal the existence of a supernatural power.

A few days before her wedding, a young woman learns that her fiancé is accused of sexual assault. She goes to Haiti to confront the alleged victim.

Laura Huertas Millan is a French-Colombian filmmaker and visual artist, whose practise stands at the intersection between cinema, contemporary art and research.

Selected in cinema festivals such as the Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Film Festival and Cinéma du Réel, her films have earn prizes at the Locarno Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa and Videobrasil, among others. More than twenty retrospectives and focus of her work have been organised around the globe, in cinematheques such as Toronto ́s TIFF Lightbox, Harvard ́s Film Archive or Bogota ́s cinematheque, and leading film festivals as Mar del Plata and Rencontres du Documentaire de Montreal.

In the art field, her latest solo exhibitions were held at the MASP Sao Paulo, Maison des Arts de Malakoff and Medellin ́s Modern Art Museum. Her films have also been exhibited and screened in art institutions (Centre Pompidou Paris, Jeu de Paume, Guggenheim Museum NY, Times Art Berlin) and biennials (Liverpool, FRONT Triennial, Videobrasil, Videonnale). They are part of private and public collections (Kadist, CNAP, Banco de la República de Colombia, CIFO, FRAC Lorraine, and others).

Huertas Millan holds a practise-based PhD on “Ethnographic Fictions” developed between PSL University (SACRe program) and the Sensory Ethnography Lab (Harvard University). She works as an educator in academic and alternative spaces. Since 2019, Huertas Millan is part of a research-based duo with curator and writer Rachael Rakes on critical anthropology and the aesthetics and politics of the encounter.

Miryam Charles is a Montreal based Canadian filmmaker. She studied cinema at Concordia University and has worked as a director, producer, writer, and cinematographer. Her short films include Fly, Fly Sadness (2015), Towards the Colonies (2016), A Fortress (2018), and Three Atlas (2018). Her works have been screened at various film festivals around the world. Her latest short film Second Generation (2019) was presented at TIFF. A retrospective of her work was presented at the cinémathèque québécoise (2019). In 2020, a second retrospective was presented during the fourth edition of the Third Horizon Film Festival in addition to an installation at the Leonard and Ellen Bina Gallery in Montreal. She is currently working on her first documentary feature, which has been awarded a grant from the Talents to watch program (Telefilm Canada).