Please join us on Saturday, May 24, 2025 at the Black Lodge Studio for Remembering Certain Souls (Yād-e Ba’zi Nafarāt).
Curated by Alireza Bayat, Remembering Certain Souls (Yād-e Ba’zi Nafarāt) is a short film program that features titles from the Winnipeg Film Group Archive and Distribution Collection.
Still from Brothers (1998) by Paul Suderman
“Working in the labyrinth of an archive, you come across materials, names, dates, and titles that transcend beyond their solid empirical and socio-historical qualities. Those names are people who invested their lives and dreams in creating realities that paved the way for an institute of cultural memory. As the person working with archival material, you sometimes have to mend things that are, seemingly, fallen apart. While caring for archival materials, you realize that you are not just working with the physicality of materials but also with the external devices of memory they bring along. You find yourself re-membering the dismembered parts while remembering the names, histories, and stories they keep within.
At the same time and in the broader picture, you see how these contributions lead to the creation of a group and community that possesses a shared memory that all the members may comprehend in a common way. A collective cultural memory that holds a certain heritage and even further develops its own aesthetics. These memories, on the one hand, are socially mediated by the ones who remember and what they remember. On the other hand, this remembering gives the members of the group ambition, means of orientation, and self-identification to continue their creative, imaginative, and perceptive lives today. These films, as devices of collective cultural memory of the Winnipeg Film Group, may “brighten us within”, and “lend us strength”, and “give us courage” to continue creating, imagining, and fighting, while witnessing the past. In the way that modernist Persian poet, Nima Yooshij, wrote in May 1948, remembering his late reformist comrades.”
-Alireza Bayat, Curator
Remembering Certain Souls
(Yād-e Ba’zi Nafarāt)
Remembering certain souls
brightens me within.
They lend me strength,
they set me on the way.
Their breath—
bewildering, bright—
warms the hearth
of my long-cold house.
The names of certain souls
have become
the bread of my spirit.
In each hour of sorrow,
I reach toward them
They give me courage.
They brighten me within.
Remembering certain souls…
(Nima Yooshij, May 1948)
Date: Saturday, May 24, 2025
Time: Doors at 6:30pm and screening at 7:00pm
Cost: Free (Donations Recommended)
Address: 304-100 Arthur Street (Artspace Building), Winnipeg, MB
Accessibility Information:
The main entrances of the Art Space Building at Arthur St. and King St. have automatic door push triggers. The West side entrance off King St. has a wheelchair lift to access the main lobby. There are two washrooms on the third floor that are private, locking, and non-gendered. These washrooms do not have handrails or automatic doors. The first floor has non-gendered, multi-stall washrooms. Washrooms on these floors have wheelchair accessible stalls with handrails, but do not have automatic doors.
Refreshments and snacks will be available for purchase.
Presented by the Winnipeg Film Group and Archive/ Counter-Archive.
