circa

8:00 / Canada / Super 8 / Sound

Synopsis: Using Spadina Museum as its visual and contextual backdrop, circa is a piece that reclaims the agency of Black identities and bodies in Toronto’s history. Now an empty space, what was once Spadina Museum offers a socially-loaded canvas to question the grey area between imagined and erased. The superimposition of imagined bodies rewrites their erased stories, they blend through the house’s shadows before regaining their individual identities when their faces meet the light. circa encourages a dialogue between present and past: as the filmmaker repaints the ghosts of the Austin’s family, the othered show us their eyes.

Director: Sonya Mwambu

Artist bio: Sonya Mwambu is an experimental filmmaker and editor based in Toronto. Born in Kampala, they grew up in Canada and their work centres on the intersections of their identities through the exploration of race, language and the connections they find through their cultural identity and the experimentations of analog film. Mwambu holds a BFA in Film Production from York University.