An examination of the politics of naming, belonging, and cartography. Maps blur and names shift as the filmmaker questions colonial logics of place and identity, asking: how do we rename ourselves in a world that has already named—and claimed—so much?

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An outcome of a collaboration between Cadence Video Poetry Festival workshop participants and artist Kamila Kuc, this program of shorts This is How We Dream addresses the urgent entanglements of ecology, memory, ancestry, and imagination in a world shaped by crisis and marked by a need for transformation. Emerging from a series of workshops that foregrounded collective inquiry, poetic expression, and embodied reflection, these films offer intimate gestures of care, resistance, and repair.

Through personal archives, speculative futures, rivers remembered and names reimagined, the filmmakers explore how creation becomes a form of survival, how we trace what is vanishing while planting seeds for what might still grow. Whether mourning the loss of indigenous knowledge, witnessing environmental degradation, or offering visual lullabies to future generations, these works resist erasure through tenderness and radical attention.

At once cinematic letters, dreamscapes, and elegies, these shorts invite viewers to listen more deeply: to the land, to the ancestors, to what remains, and to what might be possible still. Together, they form a collective poem: one that shelters grief and wonder in equal measure.

** This program is supported by Dark Spring Studio (London) and Seattle University’s Center for Environmental Justice and Sustainability **