This program, which takes its title from a new animated film by the artist Amy Sillman, shows us that acts of protest and resistance can take many forms. Abstraction, for example, can be a powerful means of persuasion, whether through a disembodied voice (Elisabeth Subrin’s Manal Issa, 2024) or a mapping of historical erasure (Antoine Chapon’s The Orchards), an apocalyptic vision of war (Arshia Shakiba’s Who Loves the Sun), or more distillate evocations of sexual and political violence (Alina Orlov’s The Cavalry and Helin Çelik’s HABĀ).
Abstraction as Apprehension. 2025. USA. Directed by Amy Sillman. 1 min.
Published in the Washington Post on August 9, 2024—just three months before the presidential election—this animation, made from cut-up ink drawings by the painter Amy Sillman and set to a foreboding score by Marina Rosenfeld, imagines summer as a time of “apprehension,” a time when, as Sillman observes, “roses bloom but their thorns also prick.”
Manal Issa, 2024. 2025. Lebanon/USA. Directed by Elisabeth Subrin. 10 min. World premiere.
Reuniting Elisabeth Subrin with the Lebanese-French actress Manal Issa (a collaborator on Subrin’s award-winning short film Maria Schneider, 1983 and gallery installation The Listening Takes), this pendant work thrums with tension and political urgency as the artists react to the devastating crisis of the Middle East and to the experience of being silenced.
Al Basateen (The Orchards). 2025. France. Directed by Antoine Chapon. 24 min. North American premiere.
Ten years after the civil war in Syria, in the face of a new urban project built on historical erasure, two displaced Syrian residents recall the vibrant community and orchards of Basateen al-Razi, a Damascus neighborhood that was destroyed by armed forces in 2015 as punishment for the community’s uprising against the Assad regime.
The Cavalry. 2024. Canada/USA/Israel. Directed by Alina Orlov. 17 min. New York premiere.
Intending to document public protests against the Israeli government in September 2023, Alina Orlov discovers a facility for the training of Israeli police horses, and out of this creates a subtly layered, provocative meditation on obedience and subjugation.
Who Loves the Sun. 2024. Canada. Directed by Arshia Shakiba. 19 min. New York premiere.
In northern Syria, a land laid waste by civil war, Mahmood oversees a dangerous makeshift refinery operation that generates fuel and income for the displaced population, providing transportation, heating, and cooking.
HABĀ. 2024. Austria/Spain. Directed by Helin Çelik. 23 min. New York premiere.
HABĀ opens in darkness, a darkness pierced by the agitated voice of a young woman, Sahar, who fears for her life. Suddenly, as the recorded phone conversation cuts off, we are led to understand that Sahar has disappeared. Searching for the traces she has left behind, Helin Çelik, a Kurdish artist based in Austria, honors Sahar’s memory, and that of so many other victims of femicide and honor killings, in her stirring, poetic essay.
Program 94 min.