We have paired up with the Denver Public Library to present…
INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place./it flies. falls./]
and NRO “Never Settle: Calling in”
Virtual Q&A after the screening W/ Zack Khalil!
November 14th 2024
@ Westwood Community Center – Sandos Hall
Denver, CO 80219
6:00pm doors. 6:30pm screening (not punk time)
REPEAT 6:00PM SCREENING. 6:30PM SCREENING! NOT. PUNK. TIME.
EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
The trailer can be seen below.
Artist Bio:
Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil, members of the Sault Ste Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, are filmmakers and artists whose work centers Indigenous narratives in the present—and looks towards the future—through the use of innovative nonfiction forms. The Khalils are the co-directors and co-editors of the feature documentary INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place./ it flies. falls./] (2016) which premiered as the closing night film of the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight Film Festival, and the documentary short The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets (2018) which premiered at Sundance. The Khalils are also core contributors to New Red Order. Adam is a co-founder of COUSINS Collective, and Zack works professionally as a video editor, most recently co-editing Alison O’Daniels feature film The Tuba Thieves (2023), which premiered at Sundance.
The Khalil’s work has been screened/exhibited at Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, Sundance Film Festival, New York Film Festival, HKW, Walker Arts Center, Lincoln Center, Palais de Tokyo, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Creative Time, 59th Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial 2019, Toronto Biennial 2019, Sharjah Biennial 15, and Counterpublic Triennial 2023, among other institutions. The Khalils are the recipients of various fellowships and grants, including a 2021 Creative Capital Award, 2020 Herb Alpert Award, Sundance Art of Nonfiction, Jerome Artist Fellowship, Cinereach and the Gates Millennium Scholarship.
NRO “Never Settle: Calling in” Statement:
This promotional initiation video lures inductees with promises of decolonization and settler remediation. Imagery of settler-led planetary destruction is juxtaposed with sequences of underground group therapy sessions where settlers can lose, forget, and explore their identities In order to indigenize. Deploying and containing confrontational representations around the stakes of accompliceship, the video examines the dynamics influencing the conditions in which the concerns of indigenous people are often treated as a topic du jour and then co-opted by non-indigenous people, alongside the search for ways to make amends.
INAATE/SE/ Statement:
Adam and Zack Khalil’s debut film re-imagines the Seven Fires Prophecy, an Anishinaabe story which both predates and predicts the arrival of Europeans in North America. The story not only foretells their arrival, but urges the Anishinaabe people to begin a great migration westward to avoid them. It goes on to narrativize the devastating consequences of colonization, while also providing direction for the recovery of the Anishinaabe way of life in the future.
To reclaim this narrative from the archives and museums that would confine it to the past, the film transcends linear colonized history to explore how the prophecy resonates through the generations in their indigenous community on the Michigan/Canadian border. With acute geographic specificity, and grand historical scope, the film fixes its lens between the sacred and the profane to pry open the construction of contemporary indigenous identity.
The filmmakers traverse this varied terrain by an equally varied assortment of methods—interviews, animations, staged fictions, narrated capsule histories, expressionist montage, and détourned museum videos to name just a few. The film is by turns warm with human love and icy with studied hatred; soberly responsible and uproariously perverse; gently didactic and vehemently defiant. Confident in its antagonism without ever lapsing into smug self-regard; formally adventurous but never esoteric, INAATE/SE/ is an inimitable model for what radical documentary in the 21st century might be.