Art in Migrations: Sarah Shamash

(An)other Season is an auto-fiction film about what it means to live as a human during global turmoil. It combines Shamash's own archival videos of life in Paris in 2003, when making art seemed possible, with audios from reports on the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza from The Electronic Intifada and Democracy Now! from 2025 when the US-brokered ceasefire was supposed to protect additional Palestinian civilians from being massacred by Israeli military forces, when the idea of making art seemed simultaneously impossible and necessary. The act of looking back at archival footage opens the question of how people in the future will think about us and how will this time be judged by future generations.

This archival material is woven in original footage of Mandana Mansouri and Natasha McHardy, as they reunite for an intimate encounter of friendship to the background of a crumbling world order. They exchange stories about the past that shape the present and might reshape the future, culminating in a series of desires to make films in the present. In the film's end credits, the underlying presence of migration emerges, not in the voluntary trips to study abroad or to visit friends, but in the accumulating layers of acknowledgments that are required due to dispossession, forced migration, and genocide across two settler colonies. This film was made on the stolen land of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh; it was made with no outside institutional funding; it was made with friends and self-funded; it was made during a live-streamed genocide and "in solidarity with Indigenous people resisting colonization from Turtle Island to Palestine."