The aim of this article is to examine how different modes of moving image practice can expose and critique the impacts of extractive capitalism and settler colonialism on Indigenous communities in northern Canada. The article focuses on the work of two contemporary artist-filmmakers, Thirza Cuthand and Thomas Kneubühler. Their work has consistently engaged with the impacts of late capitalist violence and power within the context of settler-colonial Canada. The article argues that these filmmakers’ engagements and critiques of such formations of power are built around radically different framings and conceptualizations of futurity—as both a dominant logic within the exploitative rationale of extractive capitalist speculation and projection (Kneubühler), but also as a potential catalyst for Indigenous decolonization and self-determination (Cuthand).

Dubai is often defined by aerial shots of its landmark architecture in Bollywood and Hollywood films. By activating fantasies of seeing the whole city, the lived social realities of the city’s inhabitants fade from view. With Ali F. Mostafa’s City of Life (Dar al-haya, 2009, United Arab Emirates) as an example, this article explores the possibility of a cinema of contact zones, drawing upon Dubai’s historical interconnections with the world through intersecting globalizations. The film offers parallel narratives about different classes of residents that overlap, mingle, compete, align, and realign in spaces that are experienced differently. Stories of Emirati best friends, Indian taxi drivers and businessmen, East European flight attendants, and British “expats,” as well as other less visible residents, convey how lives entangle but do not entwine into community. Rather than reducing the film to an example of “national cinema” or “world cinema,” it is more productive to understand it as a film about a city that is itself produced through relationships to multiple places. The film invites audiences to think about noticing connections, rather than take comfort in confirming assumptions. It does not reward audiences with voyeuristic consumption of the city in its totality. More than a conflict zone, as the Middle East is often conceived, Dubai is a contact zone. City of Life acknowledges that Dubai is neither free of social inequities nor defined by them. Dubai is a place of possibilities and risks. It is a contact zone with all the contradictions that contact zones always contain.