Special Screening

Remapping Futures presents experimental films and videos that fuse analog and digital media to document the afterlives of places and communities influenced by migration and urban transformation. Through archival research, film collage, 3D scanning, and digital animation, the selected works explore the capacity of moving images in preserving historical events and diasporic memories.

From the story of 8.75mm films once circulated in China to the imagined futures of Toronto’s Chinatown built upon community storytelling, the program considers how places and objects carry intergenerational memories. Together, these works examine ways of recovering lost histories, reanimating abandoned sites, and connecting with loved ones who are no longer with us. 

Remapping Futures is part of the public program for the exhibition, Depixelating History at The New Gallery.

Written & Curated by Gladys Lou.

Program Lineup:

• Peng Zuqiang, Afternoon Hearsay四散, 2025, 19 min, super 8, 16mm and 35mm transferred into digital
• “8.75mm is a gauge of celluloid filmstrip that circulated exclusively in China between the 1960s and 1980s. Designed primarily for itinerant screenings in villages and rural areas, the format never had its own dedicated camera. By blending 8.75mm film prints with contemporary Super 8 footage, Peng Zuqiang takes us on a sensorial journey into the past of a country defined by rapid transformation, preserving a fragment of memory endangered by oblivion.”- Rebecca De Pas

• Simon Liu and Jennie MaryTai Liu, -force-, 2020, 9 min, 16mm & AE Animation to 2K
• “Placid views of Hong Kong merge with dizzying, semi-abstract digital animations—avatars in a parable about control. A mesmerizing, menacing voiceover—part body politic regulator, part cyberpunk travel guide—both promises order, accountability, and satisfaction, and threatens trouble, polarization, and tears. A fire has been started, movement has gone on to reach multiple points of no return.”– Simon Liu

• Linda Zhang Chinatown 2050, 2020, 17:43 min, video
• “An experimental short film featuring stories shared by Asian Canadian youth living in Toronto’s Chinatown. Made through LiDAR 3D scans and visual collage, and informed by conversations with the Toronto Community Land Trust, the work documents and preserves the neighbourhood’s architecture while collectively reimagining its future as an affordable and culturally meaningful home.” – Gladys Lou
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• Daphne Xu ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong, 2024, 9 min, 16mm to digital
• “The ping pong table at Seward Park in New York City and the in-between space of a Cold War. An immigration lawyer advises on how to tell the truth.”– Daphne Xu
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• Gabriel Gabriel Garble, Well Wishes My Love, Your Love, 2022, 9 min, digital animation, 16:9, colour, stereo 48 kHz
• “Newly orphaned and freshly wounded from a loss, a boy lends his companion a prosthetic arm for the day. The companion would then expose the prosthetic limb to different textures and materials, documenting the process. As the moon inches closer and closer towards the sun, the boy sees something unusual reflected on the water's surface... What will become of the limb, and of the video recordings?” – Gabriel Gabriel Garble

About the Curator:

Gladys Lou is a curator and critic with an M.A. in Curatorial Studies at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, and a B.A. from the University of Toronto. She was awarded a Fulbright scholarship with a placement at the University of Washington, where she studied Digital Arts and Experimental Media in 2022. She has held curatorial and research positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Vtape, the Blackwood Gallery, and Ontario Culture Days. Her independent curatorial projects include "Curator Diary": The Curatorial Work of Shigeko Kubota (2026) at the Hessel Museum of Art, To see the world in a grain of sand (2025) at Factory Media Centre, and All watched over by machines of loving grace (2023) at InterAccess. Lou's critical writing and journalism have appeared in Hyperallergic, ArtReview, ArtAsiaPacific, C Magazine, MUBI Notebook, and Public Parking.

Set in Toronto during the two weeks leading up to a total solar eclipse, the film follows ten interconnected characters whose fleeting sexual encounters reveal a profound sense of emotional isolation and longing for connection. Blending colour cinematography with striking black-and-white sequences, Eclipse captures a city on the brink of both a rare celestial event and personal transformation.

This screening is programmed by Dr. David Christopher, Lecturer in Popular Screen Cultures at the University of Leicester and author of Toronto New Wave Cinema: Anarchist Apocalypse, which explores how filmmakers including David Cronenberg, Bruce LaBruce, and Patricia Rozema used apocalyptic and anarchist ideas to critique social and patriarchal structures in Canadian cinema. Books available for purchase at the screening.

Calgary Cinematheque is pleased to present this special screening of Eclipse (1994) in collaboration with the Dr. David Christopher & Dickens Pub.

Times:

• Doors open at 6 pm.
• Show at 7 pm
• Post show discussion at 8:45 pm.

Seats are first come, first served.

No food or alcohol service during the screening. Pre-orders are available before the film begins.

About the programmer: 



Dr David Christopher is a Lecturer in Popular Screen Cultures for the School of Arts, Media, and Communication and Programme Co-Lead in SHAPE Foundation Studies at the University of Leicester in the UK. He received his PhD in Critical Cultural Studies of Film and Media from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada under the tutelage of anarchist art historian Prof. Allan Antliff and critical feminist film theorist Dr. Lianne McLarty. David has worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of the Fraser Valley (Canada) and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (China) before settling at the University of Leicester where he co-founded the Festival of Media Stories and initiated the Media Health Project. David was born and raised in Canada and weaned on Canadian media and television for which he has fond sentiments. His teaching and research covers a range of scholarship including anarchist cultural studies, Canadian cinema, horror film and video games, apocalypse and sci-fi cinema, journalism and media studies, and theatre history.