Full of rage with a prankster’s side-eye and biting critique, filmmaker, curator and mentor Adam Khalil’s work breaks and bends linear time, weaves narrative, documentary, and experimental forms together with humor and unapologetic political inquiry to address the ongoing trauma of colonization. Above all, his practice is a collaborative one, with multiple collaborations and multiple roles within each collaboration. He and Zack Khalil, his brother, are currently working on a new feature documentary about the repatriation of Native American human remains. A member of the Ojibway Tribe, he is a founding member of New Red Order, an interdisciplinary “public secret society” that co-produces video, performance, and installation works confronting settler colonial tendencies and obstacles to Indigenous growth. He is also a co-founder of Cousins Collective, an Indigenous-led film non-profit created to provide support for Indigenous artists who expand traditional understandings of the moving image by experimenting with form and genre. Other collaborations with Bayley Sweitzer have focused on creating experimental, politically urgent films that undermine traditional forms and roles of narrative filmmaking; all the work and the ways of making it are a counterweight to what Khalil calls “the individualism and auteurism that runs rampant in film and art circles.”

photo: Bayley Sweitzer