East Side Divide - Art’s 1,000,050th Birthday Film Program

Location: Waldorf Hotel, Vancouver


Still image from Ariadne’s Thread (2009) by Sarah Shamash

Ariadne’s Thread
This experimental short film takes its name from the Greek myth wherein Ariadne falls in love with Theseus who seeks to kill the Minotaur in Daedalus' labyrinth.  From one architectural maze to another, the red thread leads the viewer on a journey that weaves in and out of a dream like state, in and out of an occasionally intrusive present reality.

Direction, Camera, Editing: Sarah Shamash
Running time: 12mins

Completion date: February 2009

Aljidar (The Wall)
A short experimental film about the apartheid wall that has been built by the Israeli government in Palestine, tearing apart the West bank and isolating many into ghettos. The film was shot in London, England.

Written & Directed by: Dima Alansari
Running time: 9min 30 sec
Completion date: 2005


Artists

Sarah Shamash is a media artist born in 1977 in Vancouver, where she currently lives and works. Informed by cinema, her research and process based practice engages socio- and psycho- geographies through the exploration of specific places, people and mapping strategies that convey personal and experiential knowledge through everyday life.  Her work has been exhibited internationally since the 2000’s.  

Filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist Dima Alansari was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1977 and has produced numerous videos, shorts, documentaries and TV projects including Storm from the South, an intimate glimpse of the six critical days before the first Kuwait elections where women were allowed to participate and run for office for the first time in their history.  Dima currently lives and creates in Vancouver and is currently working on Wajd: Music, Politics & Ecstasy, a documentary about Arab -Ottoman music and its delicate relationship with Islam and the state.