Admission:
General $10
Student $7
July 15, 2025, 8:30pm
Brooklyn 11205
USA
Join us at the e-flux Screening Room rooftop for Simultaneous Pasts, the second of the four-part series Decision Moment, presenting artists' films and cinema features that reflect on historical moments of action and inaction and examine cinematic ways of approaching them.
At the core of each screening lies a past event shaped—knowingly or not—by a decision pursued, postponed, or left unmade, whose consequences continue to linger. Rather than reconstructing the past events as heroic acts, the films presented in this program embrace the limits of linear narration as ethical commitment to the complexities of historical decisions, and encourage viewers to reflect on their own actions and decisions in the present.
Screenings take place on Tuesdays from July 8–29, 2025, and begin after sunset.
II: Simultaneous Pasts
Tuesday, July 15, 2025, 8:30pm
Overcoming the inherent difficulties of objective reconstruction of the past, and thinking along Buddhist or quantum understandings of space and time, where multiple, equally valid perspectives coexist simultaneously, these films approach their past events as lived experiences that become most tangible in their multiple versions.
Basim Magdy, The Many Colors of the Sky Radiate Forgetfulness (2014, Egypt, 11 minutes)
A dreamy, semi-abstract film operates in a “post-historical” mode, where time’s linear progress has broken down. Magdy’s visuals of animals, architecture, and landscapes appear out of time, as ruins and habitats, bathed in surreal colors. The narrative voiceovers speak in poetic fragments, as if multiple histories or realities are overlapping. Critics note Magdy’s work imagines “different versions of reality… that look familiar but are unrecognizable”, inviting viewers to fill gaps with their own memories.
Anocha Suwichakornpong, By the Time It Gets Dark (2016, Thailand, 105 minutes)
This formally audacious work circles around the 1976 massacre of student activists in Thailand, yet never settles into a single perspective or timeline. Instead, it inhabits a state of narrative diffraction, where characters shift identities and cinema turns inward on its own representational limits. Suwichakornpong interrogates the impulse to document and bear witness, showing how historical trauma dislocates both subject and film form.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
