Media City Film Festival 2023 Catalogue

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 7 7:00PM [OPENING NIGHT DETROIT]

AN ECSTATIC EXPERIENCE SEGUES TO INFINITY: THE FILMS OF JA’TOVIA GARY & LIVE PERFORMANCE

BY LARAAJI JA’TOVIA GARY & LARAAJI IN PERSON

DETROIT FILM THEATRE at the DETROIT INSTITUTE OF ARTS

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PRESENTING PARTNERS: DETROIT INSTITUTE OF ARTS, DETROIT FILM THEATRE, TRINOSOPHES, AND ALLIED MEDIA PROJECTS.

MEDIA CITY FILM FESTIVAL: OPENING NIGHT DETROIT AN ECSTATIC EXPERIENCE SEGUES TO INFINITY: THE FILMS OF JA’TOVIA GARY & LIVE PERFORMANCE BY LARAAJI Tuesday, November 7, 2023 7:00 pm Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Film Theatre, 5200 John R. St, Detroit FREE admission Media City Film Festival kicks off its Opening Night in Detroit with an incredible FREE evening of film and music showcasing a retrospective look at the work of Ja’Tovia Gary, one of the United States’ most significant contemporary moving image artists. The night’s program also includes a rare performance by Harlem-based multiinstrumentalist, mystic, and laughter meditation guru Laraaji. Both artists will be in attendance at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Film Theatre.

With The Giverny Suite currently on view at The Museum of Modern Art through 2024, this retrospective of Ja’Tovia Gary’s films represents the Detroit premiere of her most recent film Quiet as It’s Kept (2023), a cinematic response to Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye. Ja’Tovia Gary’s work across documentary, video art, sculp-

ture, and installation challenges notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity. Applying what bell hooks terms “an oppositional gaze” as both a maker and critical spectator of moving images, her work aims to unmask power and its influence on how we perceive and formulate reality.

Gary’s films and installations serve as reparative gestures for the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed.

An Ecstatic Experience, 16mm > digital, 6 min, 2015 The Giverny Document, S16mm > digital, 41 min, 2019 Quiet as It’s Kept, 16mm & S8mm > digital, 26 min, 2023 I am simultaneously creating and destroying, remaking and unmaking. My intimate interaction with the archive ... expresses my desire to be a part of it, to make my presence felt in and on that history while also interrogating it.—Ja’Tovia Gary Screening followed by a musical performance by Laraaji.

To enjoy Laraaji’s work is to remember that the process of healing is infinite. In the context of the coronavirus and the current wave of resistance against white supremacy, his music is a reminder that the work of imagining a different world exceeds a lifetime. As the writer and activist Audre Lorde has noted, this work is part of a continuum, one that does not begin with one person’s birth or death. Laraaji offers us a nourishing call, one that asks us to briefly pause—to consider the restorative qualities of the sun, the gift of quiet contemplation, and the relief of a good, unexpected laugh—as we continue to fight.–Isabelia Herrera

Ja’Tovia Gary (1984). Works in sculpture, installation, and film; exhibitions at institutions including Hammer Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Centre Pompidou. Seven films since 2012; screenings at venues including Locarno Film Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, BlackStar Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Toronto International Film Festival, and Harvard Film Archive. Work in the permanent collections of institutions including Whitney Museum of American Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Founding member (2013) of New Negress Film Society, a collective of Black women filmmakers. Creative Capital Award (2019), Guggenheim Fellowship (2022).

Laraaji (1943). Multi-instrumentalist specializing in piano, zither and mbira. One of new age music’s most distinctive, prolific, and charismatic artists. More than 50 releases from 1978–2023 on labels including Spirit Music, All Saints Records, and Numero Group; frequent collaborator with other musicians including Brian Eno, Audio Active, and Blues Control; performances at venues worldwide including Music Gallery, Kennedy Center, and Barbican Centre. Before his music career worked as a comedian and actor, appearing in Putney Swope (1969). Studied with gurus including Swami Satchidananda and Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati; practitioner of Laughter Meditation workshops since the 1980s. Lives in Harlem, New York.

Film program curated by Oona Mosna. Music programmed by Greg Baise.

Organizing committee: Brandon Walley, Rebecca Mazzei, Forest Juziuk, Aaron Glasser, Larry Baranski, and staff at DIA/DFT.

COMPETITION JURY Faraz Anoushahpour (1987). Artist, filmmaker, and programmer originally from Iran, now based in Canada. Bachelor in Architecture from Architectural Association (London, UK); MFA (Interdisciplinary Art) from OCAD (Toronto).

Programmer at Images Festival (2014–2018).

15+ films and installations since 2013 in collaboration with Parastoo Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko; screenings and exhibitions at venues including European Media Art Festival, Viennale, The Museum of Modern Art, Media City Film Festival, and New York Film Festival.

MCFF Chrysalis Fellow (2020). Lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Ed Halter (1970). Film programmer and writer born in Boston, now based in New York. Director of Light Industry in Brooklyn and curator of screenings and exhibitions at venues including Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum, Institute of Contemporary Arts, and Tate Modern. Programmer and Director of New York Underground Film Festival (1995–2005). Author of several books including Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games (2006) and frequent contributor to Artforum, Cinema Scope, frieze, The New Yorker, and other publications. Critic in Residence, Film and Electronic Arts, at Bard College (Red Hook). Lives in New York, New York.

Malena Szlam (1979). Artist and filmmaker born in Chile, now based in Canada. Studied visual art at ARCIS University (Santiago); MFA (Film Production) from Concordia University (Montréal). 10+ films and installations since 2008; screenings at venues including New York Film Festival, CPH:DOX, International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Los Angeles Filmforum, and Moscow International Film Festival. MCFF Underground Mines commissioned artist (2015).

Awarded Grand Prix Melbourne IFF and TIFF’s Top Ten Canadian Films (2018). Member of Double Negative, a collective dedicated to production and exhibition of experimental cinema.

Lives in Montréal, Québec.

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 8 7:45PM

COME OUT: FILMS OF NARCISA HIRSCH

THE CAPITOL THEATRE PRESENTING PARTNERS: FILMOTECA NARCISA HIRSCH AND HENRY FORD MUSEUM.

COME OUT: FILMS OF NARCISA HIRSCH Wednesday, November 8, 2023 7:45 pm The Capitol Theatre, 121 University Ave. West, Windsor Pay What You Like admission Introduced by Tomas Rautenstrauch, grandson of the artist and Director of the Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch, who attends from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Come Out: Films of Narcisa Hirsch is curated and organized to coincide with the first phase of a major restoration project spearheaded by the newly founded Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch in Buenos Aires and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, with the aim to preserve the moving image legacy of one of the foremost living figures in the history of South American and international avant-garde cinema.

Currently based in Patagonia, and now in her 96th year, Narcisa Hirsch is a pivotal figure in 20th century art and a legend in her home country of Argentina and beyond. Across the last seven decades—a period marked by two military dictatorships—she has been immersed in a collaborative, multi-disciplinary milieu of filmmaking, happenings, performances, installation, and urban interventions that helped make Buenos Aires one of the most advanced and vibrant centres of the post-war avant-garde.

During her career Hirsch has completed dozens of Super 8 and 16mm films centered on themes including love, the body, death, movement, and the female gaze. She has also produced numerous films and projects in collaboration with other artists such as Werner Nekes, Claudio Caldini, Juan José Mugni, Juan Villola, Horacio Valleregio, and Marie Louise Alemann.

Over the years Hirsch’s films have often screened in non-institutional settings in Buenos Aires as part of informal and underground gatherings, with infrequent engagements occurring more recently at major institutions such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid (2020). Until recently, much of Hirsch’s oeuvre only existed as camera originals, meaning one copy of each film was available anywhere in the world. Her extensive catalogue of originals is now consequently in fragile condition and cannot yet be screened publicly in their original formats. The current restoration process has brought to light the complexity of Hirsch’s practice, unearthing multiple versions of previously known films, entirely new discoveries, as well as works in progress and unfinished films. As this project continues beyond the digitization phase, one important objective is to restore many of her works to circulation as film prints.

Manzanas, 16mm > digital, 4.5 min, 1969 A-Dios, S8mm > digital, 26 min, 1984 Canciones Napolitanas, 16mm > digital, 10 min 1971 Come Out, 16mm > 35mm, 11 min, 1974 Orfeo ed Euridice, S8mm > digital, 12 min, 1976 Workshop, 16mm > digital, 11 min, 1974

Experimental film is a subversive art, more so than documentary or political cinema.

More subversive than intellectual or conceptual cinema. Which is why so few go into it, and even fewer stay.—Narcisa Hirsch Narcisa Hirsch (1928) is a pioneering multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker born in Berlin, Germany. She relocated to Buenos Aires with her family in the 1930s. Hirsch has completed 50+ films since the mid-1960s. Originally working as a painter, printmaker, and sculptor, her interest in film arose during the documentation of collaborative public performances and happenings undertaken in the streets of Buenos Aires and London. One of these early performances, La Marabunta (1967), was shot by Raymundo Gleyzer, famed filmmaker and political opponent of Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976–1984), who disappeared in 1976. The piece featured a giant wire sculpture of a skeleton stuffed with live parrots and pigeons and adorned in fruits, sandwiches, and candies. Around this time, Hirsch travelled to New York where she studied filmmaking and attended screenings at Anthology Film Archives and other institutions, going on to create dozens of works on Super 8, 16mm, and video. Her films have been the subject of major retrospectives at venues including Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2010), Viennale (2012), and Documenta Athens (2017). She is the author of several books including Philosophy Is a Useless Passion (2015). The Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch was established in 2019 to preserve her films and provide a cultural space for artists’ film in Buenos Aires. She lives and works in Patagonia.

Curated by Oona Mosna with input from Tomas Rautenstrauch.

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 8 9:30PM

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION 1 HARRY SMITH ROSE LOWDER LUKE FOWLER TETSUYA MARUYAMA AMY HALPERN SIEGFRIED FRUHAUF ALEXANDRE LAROSE DAÏCHI SAÏTO

THE CAPITOL THEATRE PRESENTING PARTNERS: CJAM, ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES, AND ARTS COUNCIL WINDSOR AND REGION.

FILM NO. 11 (MIRROR ANIMATIONS) Harry Smith, USA, 16mm, 4 min, 1956–57

Mirror Animations uses cutouts, found material, collage, and Thelonious Monk’s “Misterioso” to orbit around planets, fish, and rays of light on the path to enlightenment.

Restored by Anthology Film Archives.

Harry Smith (1923–1991). Multi-disciplinary artist, musicologist, and Gnostic bishop whose activities were central to the mid-century American avant-garde. 20+ films from 1939–1981; compiled and produced the three-volume Anthology of American Folk Music (1952); Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement (1991). Assembled the world’s largest known collection of paper airplanes. Canonized a Saint in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica (2023).

BOUQUETS 31–40

Rose Lowder, France, 16mm, 11 min, 2015–2022 Colours, objects and their treatments go beyond the discourse of scientific research that the filmmaker usually tends to maintain. We cannot ignore the high sensuality of the scenes and their choices. Rose Lowder favours scenes of nature, even though some of the sites filmed are located in the city. Through their filmic transformation, they no longer appear to be urban manifestations but natural landscapes. In this way, Rose Lowder continues an impressionist tradition; working in nature rather than in the studio; like Cezanne, working on site is the sine qua non condition in order to reveal the “little sensation” and represent it.—Yann Beauvais

Rose Lowder (1941). 50+ films since 1978; recent solo screenings at venues including Tate Modern, REDCAT, Media City Film Festival, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, and Cinema Project Portland. Worked as a film editor for BBC in London, England in the 1960s. Author of The Visual Aspect: Recent Canadian Experimental Film (1991) and other books. Co-founder of Archives du film expérimental d’Avignon (1981). Lives in Avignon, France

COP26FILM

Luke Fowler, Scotland, 16mm, 7 min, 2023 COP26FILM was shot in Fowler’s home city of Glasgow during the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in 2021. Denied entry to the main “blue zone” the artist instead made daily walks around the periphery of the site recording the temporary infrastructure of the conference: security systems, cordons, and the omnipresence of police helicopters. Fowler offsets these displays of state power with a patchwork of alternative interventions that took place: mass protests, temporary squats, and the significance of the Minga Indígena, a collective of over 100 Indigenous leaders who travelled to Glasgow to claim representation and space at the conference.—Galerie Gisela Capitain Luke Fowler (1978). 20+ films since 2001; exhibitions and screenings at venues including Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Modern, Documenta Madrid, Viennale, Courtisane Festival, Serpentine Gallery, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Kunsthalle Zürich, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Berlinale, and Austrian Film Museum. Derek Jarman Award (2008), Radcliffe Fellow (2015–16), shortlisted for Turner Prize (2012). Lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

ANTFILM

Tetsuya Maruyama, Japan/Brazil, S8mm, 3 min, 2020 How can one go against the system when one is a part of it?

Tetsuya Maruyama (1983). 10+ films since 2015; works in film, performance, sound and installation; screening at venues including Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art, Hamburg International Short Film Festival, Ji.hlava IDFF, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, Mono no Aware, and Cinemateca Uruguaya. Founder of Megalab, an artistrun film lab in Rio de Janeiro. Originally from Yokohama, Japan, currently lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

4 FINGERS, 5 TOES

Amy Halpern, USA, 16mm, 10 min, 2022 Endangered animals on an endangered medium. A heartbeat 4/4 slow cinema, with a sex scene.

4 Fingers, 5 Toes captures images of the Eastern spotted newt and California golden newt in their natural habitats. Halpern shows the amphibians walking, swimming, and even mating, their staccato movements redolent of stop-motion animation.—Film Comment

Amy Halpern (1953–2022). 40+ films from 1972–2022; major retrospectives at venues including Los Angeles Film Forum, Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico. Co-founder of New York Collective for Living Cinema (1972–82) and Los Angeles Independent Film Oasis (1975–80). Frequent collaborator on projects with filmmakers such as Pat O’Neill, Charles Burnett, Ken Jacobs, David Lebrun, and others.

CAMERA TEST

Siegfried Fruhauf, Austria, 16mm > digital, 4 min, 2022 The green leader of the 16mm film is still running, yet the rattling sound is already committed to forward movement. And indeed, it moves forward, but also back again, past hills, fir trees, and apple trees—and at some point, the gaze zooms into the seemingly passing landscape; but will also be forward again. This generates a simultaneously connecting and disturbing stroboscope effect, which generates after-images and allows the landscape to appear continuous despite obvious breaks; at the same time, the interim garish green “flash” offers glaring evidence that here we are dealing with a cinematically constructed journey rather than a “natural” one. Like the soundtrack, which is based on a staccato-style playback of ocean sounds split into stereo channels rather than a linear sound recording, the images are the cinematic synthesis of several camera pans across one and the same landscape, and not the result of a journey from A to B.—Christa Benzer Siegfried Fruhauf (1976). 35+ films since 1998; screenings at venues including Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Media City FIlm Festival, Cannes Film Festival, Image Forum, Venice International Film Festival, Austrian Film Museum, Berlinale, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Centre Pompidou, San Francisco Cinematheque, Yale University, and Sundance Film Festival. Austrian Art Award for Film (2018). Lives in Vienna and Heiligenberg, Austria.

III.

Alexandre Larose, Canada, 35mm, 12 min, 2022 In this third part of Larose’s scènes de ménage, the work with movement and in-camera overlays intensifies. Figures move towards and away from the camera, with a swiping hand or a turning head taking on a gentle, volatile quality. Larose articulates a story with different sequences in which domestic interiors alternate with exterior vegetation, in a film that seems to emerge from the depths of photochemical emulsion.—Elena Duque

Alexandre Larose (1978). 20+ films since 2004; screenings at venues including New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, George Eastman Museum, European Media Art Festival, Media City Film Festival, 25FPS, Austrian Film Museum, VideoEx, New York Film Festival, Viennale, Anthology Film Archives, Image Forum and Metrograph. Films in permanent collection of Austrian Film Museum. Lives in Montréal, Québec.

EARTHEARTHEARTH

Daïchi Saïto, Japan/Canada, 35mm, 30 min, 2021 earthearthearth crystallizes into a multifaceted gem, shimmering with each lightencrusted frame. Like a constantly metamorphosing series of paintings, the film astonishes with its shifts of pigment, texture, and composition.—Ara Osterweil It is as if we are watching a movie shot by some primeval witness to the beginning of the world.—Tony Pipolo Watching earthearthearth, I understand why early 20th century painters had despaired when film was first invented. Once you feel colour breathe like this, a canvas never looks the same. In earthearthearth, colour is the real protagonist, nature its pale shadow. To put it plainly, there is only film.—Ela Bittencourt Daïchi Saïto (1970). 10+ films since 2003; screenings at venues including New York Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, M+ Museum Hong Kong, Los Angeles Film Forum, and Toronto International Film Festival. 2014 MCFF Mobile Frames Filmmaker in Residence; 2015 MCFF Underground Mines commissioned artist; MCFF Grand Prize in 2010. Cofounder of Double Negative Collective (Montréal). Lives in Montréal, Québec and upstate New York.

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 9 6:00PM

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION 2 TOMONARI NISHIKAWA BEN RIVERS CÉLINE CONDORELLI SKIP NORMAN FRIEDL VOM GRÖLLER (KUBELKA) HELENA GIRÓN SAMUEL M. DELGADO PABLO MAZZOLO SKY HOPINKA

THE CAPITOL THEATRE PRESENTING PARTNERS: GRASSHOPPER FILM, COMMON GROUND GALLERY, AND SIXPACK FILM.

LIGHT, NOISE, SMOKE, AND LIGHT, NOISE, SMOKE Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan, 16mm, 6 min, 2023

Fireworks were shot at a summer festival in Japan with a Super 16 format camera, obtaining images on the optical soundtrack area on the filmstrip. The position of the photocell to read the visual information on the optical soundtrack area in a 16mm film projector is 26 frames in advance of the position of the gate to project the image.

The footage from two rolls of 16mm film were cut into shots of 26 frames each, and the shots were alternated from one roll to another, which would further separate the sound and visual, while producing a distinct rhythm throughout the film.

Tomonari Nishikawa (1969). 15+ films and projection performances since 2009; screenings at venues including Hong Kong International Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, Berlinale, New York Film Festival, MoMA PS1, and Toronto International Film Festival. Co-founder of KLEX: Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film, Video & Music Festival.

Lives in Vestal, New York and Tokyo, Japan.

AFTER WORK

Ben Rivers and Céline Condorelli, England/Italy, 16mm > digital, 13 min, 2022 The film opens with a well-known British nursery rhyme, “Boys and Girls Come Out to Play.” It ends with a call, whispered in the ear at bedtime, to go and play and see what is going on in the street. The film is a focus of encounters, sometimes discordant, between worlds, between the poem and images, between work and play, the city and the animals, the adult world and the child’s world.—Nicolas Feodoroff Poem by Jay Bernard.

Ben Rivers (1972). 40+ films since 2003; solo screenings at venues including London Film Festival, Karlovy Vary Film Festival, and Harvard Film Archive. FIPRESCI Prize from Venice International Film Festival (2011); MCFF Chrysalis Fellow (2020). Lives in London, England.

Céline Condorelli (1974). Artistic practice between installation, architecture, and public works; presentations at venues including Serpentine Gallery and Tate Modern. 15+ artists’ books since 2007.

Lives in London, England and Milan, Italy.

CULTURAL NATIONALISM

Skip Norman, USA/Germany, 16mm > digital, 11 min, 1969 Black Power on a snowy meadow in West Berlin. Speech by Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party.

Skip Norman (1933–2015). Filmmaker, photographer, and cinematographer originally from Baltimore, Maryland; relocated to Germany in the 1960s where he made numerous films of his own or in collaboration with artists including Harun Farocki, Holger Meins, and Helke Sander; continued working as cinematographer on projects by Haile Gerima, Nikki Giovanni, and others upon returning to the USA. Retrospective of his films organized by Open City Documentary Festival in 2023.

DROWNED

Friedl vom Gröller (Kubelka), Austria, 16mm, 3 min, 2022 “Als sie ertrunken war und hinunter schwamm / Von den Bächen in die größeren Flüsse [Once she had drowned and started her slow descent / Down the streams to where the great rivers broaden].” In her touching, untrained voice, the filmmaker sings this Brecht/Weill song from the 1920s. No atmosphere; this song is happening in a different space. Plants on the shore, swayed by flowing water … What connection, what dialogue materializes here during the filming, what acts of selfassurance, shared rhythm; what solution? … To speak of transience would be euphemistic. The (un)touchable unity of the body, inside and out. Materially and metaphysically.—Madeleine Bernstorff Friedl vom Gröller (Kubelka) (1946). Works in photography and film; 80+ films since 1968; screenings at venues including Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, and documenta 12. Grand Austrian State Prize for Artistic Photography (2005) and Austrian Art Prize for Film (2016).

Founder of Friedl Kubelka School for Artistic Photography (1990) and Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film (2006). MCFF presented the artist’s first dual photography and film retrospective (2010). Lives in Vienna, Austria.

BLOOM

Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado, Spain, 16mm > digital, 18 min, 2023 The mythical Isla de San Borondón (St. Brendan’s Isle) appears and disappears.

Throughout history it has been placed near the Canary Islands on maps. The legend of the island of San Borondón became so pervasive that expeditions were organized to discover and conquer it for three hundred years. After centuries of oblivion, it has finally been found.

Helena Girón (1988) and Samuel M. Delgado (1987).

10+ films in collaboration since 2015; screenings at venues including Toronto International Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and Media City Film Festival. Curators of Sensitive Material in the Canary Islands (2021), including films by Guy Sherwin, Peter Hutton, Ana Vaz, and others. Live in Madrid and Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain.

THE NEWEST OLDS

Pablo Mazzolo, Argentina, 35mm, 15 min, 2022 The Newest Olds is the second installment in Argentinian filmmaker Pablo Mazzolo’s cinematic diptych exploring the natural and urban environment within and surrounding the border region of Windsor–Detroit. Completed seven years after the release of Fish Point (2015), Mazzolo’s revelatory study of light and landscape that animated the deciduous forest harbours and rare ecosystem at the southeastern tip of Pelee Island, The Newest Olds transforms Detroit’s iconic cityscapes, dislodging buildings from their foundations and collapsing the physical, political, and sensory boundaries between Canada and the United States through alchemical, in-camera, and optical printing techniques.

Pablo Mazzolo (1976). 10+ films since 2010; screenings at venues including New York Film Festival, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Cinéma du réel, Anthology Film Archives, Mar del Plata International Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque, Media City Film Festival, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, and (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico. MCFF Grand Prize (2013); MCFF Chrysalis Fellowship (2022). Lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

KICKING THE CLOUDS

Sky Hopinka, Ho-Chunk / Pechanga Band of Luiseño, 16mm > digital, 15 min, 2021 This film is a reflection on descendants and ancestors, guided by a 50-year-old audio recording of my grandmother learning the Pechanga language from her mother.

After being given this tape by my mother, I interviewed her and asked about it, and recorded her ruminations on their lives and her own. The footage is of our chosen home in Whatcom County, Washington, where my family still lives, far from our homelands in Southern California, yet a home nonetheless.

Sky Hopinka (1984). 20+ films and multi-channel media artworks since 2014; screenings at venues including Sundance Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and Whitney Biennial (2017). Guest curator at Whitney Biennial (2019). Films in permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. MCFF Chrysalis Fellowship (2020), Herb Alpert Award (2020), Guggenheim Fellowship (2020), MacArthur Fellowship (2022). Lives in upstate New York.

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 9 7:45PM

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION 3 ADAM PIRON SAM DRAKE DEBORAH STRATMAN ROUZBEH AKHBARI FELIX KALMENSON SIMON LIU FOX MAXY

THE CAPITOL THEATRE PRESENTING PARTNERS: ARTCITE INC., CINEMA LAMONT, AND SAN FRANCISCO CINEMATHEQUE.

YAANGNA PLAYS ITSELF

Adam Piron, Kiowa/Mohawk, 16mm > digital, 7 min, 2022 An ode to the memories of El Aliso, the sycamore tree that once stood at the center of Yaangna, the Indigenous Gabrieleño village that Los Angeles grew out from. All elements sourced in the film are from the original site and the nearby Los Angeles River.

Adam Piron (1986). Four films since 2019; screenings at venues including DOXA Documentary Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, and Camden International Film Festival. Director of the Indigenous Program at the Sundance Institute; former Assistant Curator of Film at Los Angeles County Museum of Art; co-founder of COUSIN, a collective supporting Indigenous artists expanding the form of film. Lives in Riverside, California.

BODY LEGATO

Sam Drake, USA, 16mm > digital, 6 min, 2022 Imagining possibilities of disembodied being. A cow becomes meat becomes man becomes angel. Consciousness is conflated with a surveillance balloon. Being is tuned to the frequency of occult conspiracy.

Sam Drake (1989). Four films since 2018; screenings at venues including CROSSROADS, Wexner Center for the Arts, Alternative Film/Video, Collectif Jeune Cinéma, Non-Syntax Experimental Image Festival, Milwaukee Film Festival, Transient Visions Festival of the Moving Image, and Antimatter. Lead Programmer of Union Cinema in Milwaukee. Member of Kino Femme Film Collective in Dayton, Ohio (2013–15). Lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

LAIKA

Deborah Stratman, USA, digital, 4.5 min, 2021 Some forms we can only know by their shadow. In homage to the spirits of space test dogs, or any being we use in the name of progress.

This music video was made by invitation of composer Olivia Block for the release of her album Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea (Room40)

Deborah Stratman (1967). 40+ films since 1990; screenings at venues including National Gallery of Art, Viennale, Media City Film Festival, Whitney Biennial (2004), Centre Pompidou, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Danish Film Institute, International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, and New York Film Festival. Herb Alpert (2014) and Creative Capital (2012) Awards; Guggenheim (2003) and Fulbright (1995) Fellowships. Lives in Chicago, Illinois.

SHOKOUK

Rouzbeh Akhbari and Felix Kalmenson, Iran/Russia/Canada, digital, 17 min, 2023 In Shokouk we overhear the gossip between a crowd gathered to observe a televised rocket launch, become acquainted with the fictional archival character Nikitin Nikifor, then join a karaoke event celebrating the inauguration of a Chinese infrastructure company in Uzbekistan, before arriving in geostationary orbit aboard the Mir space station. The artists present a constellation of anachronistic narratives drawing upon a variety of references, including the teachings of Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli on the essence of time, their own research on the harmful environmental impacts of the space industry on local livelihoods, and the works of the 12th and 13th century astronomers and polymaths Omar Khayyam and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi.

Rouzbeh Akhbari (1992) and Felix Kalmenson (1987). Collaborating under the name Pejvak on films and multimedia installations since 2015; screenings at venues including Doclisboa, Sharjah Film Platform, Kasseler Dokfest, and International Kurzfilmtage Winterthur; exhibitions at museums and galleries including Villa Arson, M HKA Antwerp, and Si Shang Art Museum. Originally from Tehran, Iran and St. Petersburg, Russia, both currently live in Toronto, Ontario.

LET’S TALK

Simon Liu, Hong Kong SAR / USA, 16mm > digital, 11 min, 2023 On the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China, directives for “a new era” promising stability and prosperity are found on murals and public slogans. Meanwhile, uneasy thoughts cast unusual shades over daily life. Old feelings arise, a pressure builds, conjuring distant voices from the concrete, never quite getting their point across. Something calls for repair but we can’t just talk it out, can we?

Simon Liu (1987). Works in film, media installation and performance; 15+ films since 2008; exhibitions at institutions including The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and Moderna Museet Stockholm; screenings at venues including Festival du Nouvéau Cinéma, Berlinale, and Jeonju International Film Festival. Work in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art and M+ Museum Hong Kong. Originally from Hong Kong SAR, currently lives in New York, New York.

F1GHTING LOOKS DIFFERENT 2 ME NOW

Fox Maxy, Luiseño/Payómkawichum and Diegueño/Iipay Kumeyaay, digital, 11 min, 2022

💔 We’re our own worst enemies.

Delivered in her signature kaleidoscopic montage style, F1ghting Looks Different 2 Me Now documents the filmmaker’s homecoming to the ancestral lands of the Mesa Grande Band of Diegueño Mission Indians. Exuberant, exhilarating, and exploding with disruptive energy, F1ghting Looks Different 2 Me Now is a portrait of people and country that reflects the artist’s ongoing explorations of time, identity, and the environment.—Melbourne International Film Festival Fox Maxy (1992). 10+ films since 2018; screenings at venues including BlackStar Film Festival, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, Media City Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, and International Film Festival Rotterdam, where she won a Tiger Short Award (2021). COUSIN Collective grantee (2020), Sundance Institute Merata Mita Fellowship (2022), Vera List Center Borderlands Fellowship (2022–24). Lives in San Diego, California.

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 9 9:30PM

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION 4 PAUL SHARITS KEVIN JEROME EVERSON AYANNA DOZIER COLECTIVO LOS INGRÁVIDOS AMY HALPERN MARY HELENA CLARK MADELEINE HUNT-EHRLICH

THE CAPITOL THEATRE PRESENTING PARTNERS: UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATIONS, COLLEGE FOR CREATIVE STUDIES, AND ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES.

PIECE MANDALA / END WAR Paul Sharits, USA, 16mm, 4 min, 1966

Blank colour frequencies space out and optically feed-fuse into black and white images of one love-making gesture which is seen simultaneously from both sides of its space and both ends of its time. Dedicated to Frances Sharits.

Restored by Anthology Film Archives.

Paul Sharits (1943–1993). 35+ films and media artworks from 1962–1987; pioneering figure of the American avantgarde film movement and the emergent disciplines of flicker film and multi-projection installation. Work in the permanent collections of institutions including Carnegie Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Pompidou, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art.

RICHLAND DESCENDING

Kevin Jerome Everson, USA, 16mm > digital, 3 min, 2023 Richland Descending is based on a Gerhard Richter painting and the stag films produced in Mansfield, Ohio in the late 1960s.

Kevin Jerome Everson (1965). 200+ films since 1997; extensive screenings at major festivals worldwide; retrospectives at Centre Pompidou (2019), Harvard Film Archive (2018), Tate Modern (2017), Media City Film Festival, and Whitney Museum of American Art (2011).

Herb Alpert Award (2012), Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities (2019), Berlin Prize (2020). MCFF has screened more than 50 films by Everson since 2009. MCFF Mobile Frames Filmmaker-in-Residence (2014). Lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

AN EXERCISE IN PARTING

Ayanna Dozier, USA, 16mm, 3 min, 2022 A go-go dancer walking home from work late at night. She attempts to resurrect her lost childhood on kiddie rides in front of a small store. Close-up images of the artist’s face collapse into abstraction as the pony ride breaks down. an exercise in parting is the concluding film in “Close, But No Cigar,” a trilogy of short 16mm films that take inspiration from adverts and soft porn aesthetics of the 1970s.

Renegotiating desire, heartbreak, grief, and its mutations and appearances in the body, the images of the series are intentionally seductive, but they ultimately fail to deliver upon the aesthetic promise of selling the audience something, or giving them an image of sex.

Ayanna Dozier (1990). Works in film, photography, printmaking, performance, and installation; exhibitions and screenings at galleries and festivals including Hauser & Wirth, Microscope Gallery, CROSSROADS, BlackStar Film Festival, Open City Documentary Festival, Prismatic Ground, and The Block Museum; films in permanent collection of Whitney Museum of American Art. Author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020) for Bloomsbury’s 331/3 series. Lives in New York, New York.

THE WINGED STONE

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Mexico, S8mm > digital, 9.5 min, 2023 Through the floating garden, into the mountain of signs and chants, arises the path of the winged stone. A stone that used to be a fossil.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos. Founded in 2012 to “dismantle the commercial and corporate audiovisual grammar and its embedded ideology.” 300+ films since 2013; screenings at venues including Bienal de la Imagen Movimiento, Whitney Biennial (2019), FICUNAM, Media City Film Festival, Los Angeles Filmforum, The Museum of Modern Art, and International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen. Poetry collection Solares published by Evidence Press (2018). Live in Tehuacán, Mexico.

BY HALVES

Amy Halpern, USA, 16mm, 8 min, 2010

By Halves uses appropriated footage from rejected 35mm prints that were cut in half and readjusted to be used as spacers for 16mm-to-sync-sound tracks on film, and not meant to be projected.

An appropriate appropriation, a gift, a magic act. The movement of the performer is slowed because one sees first the top and then the bottom of each frame in quick succession. Surprises result.

Amy Halpern (1953–2022). 40+ films from 1972–2022; major retrospectives at venues including Los Angeles Film Forum, Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico. Co-founder of New York Collective for Living Cinema (1972–82) and Los Angeles Independent Film Oasis (1975–80). Frequent collaborator on projects with filmmakers such as Pat O’Neill, Charles Burnett, Ken Jacobs, David Lebrun, and others.

EXHIBITION

Mary Helena Clark, USA, digital, 19 min, 2022 Pivoting between two stories of women and their relationships with objects—a Swedish woman’s marriage to the Berlin Wall, and a suffragist’s hatcheting of Velásquez’s The Toilet of Venus—Mary Helena Clark’s Exhibition is a maze-like tour through images and artifacts, a dense cryptography of the forms and objects that hold us in.—Leo Goldsmith I’m not a woman. I’m a doorknob.—Agnes Martin

Mary Helena Clark (1983). Works in film, video, and installation; 10+ films since 2008; screenings at venues including Open City Documentary Film Festival, New York FiIm Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, and 25 FPS. Curator of film programs for Nightingale Cinema and Flaherty NYC at Anthology Film Archives. Lives in New York, New York.

TOO BRIGHT TO SEE

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, USA, 16mm > digital, 27.5 min, 2023 Too Bright to See draws on Hunt-Ehrlich’s extensive research into the legacy of Suzanne Roussi-Césaire, a writer and anticolonial and feminist activist from Martinique who, along with her husband, Aimé Césaire, was at the forefront of the Négritude movement during the first half of the 20th century. Roussi-Césaire would also become an important Surrealist thinker, influencing the likes of painter Wifredo Lam and writer André Breton. However, despite her critical contributions to Caribbean thought and Surrealist discourse, until recently much of her work was overlooked.—Pérez Art Museum Miami

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich (1987). 10+ films since 2013; screenings at venues including Tate Modern, Berlinale, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Venice Biennale (2022), Bienal de São Paulo (2023), and BlackStar Film Festival. Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” (2020), Princess Grace Award (2014), Creative Capital Award (2022), Herb Alpert Award (2023). Lives in New York, New York.

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 10 6:00PM

REGIONAL ARTISTS’ PROGRAM NIK LIGUORI JULIA YEZBICK DREAM HAMPTON ALANA BARTOL BRYCE KRYNSKI MICHELE GOULETTE

ADAM SEKULER CALLA MOYA DEREK JENKINS HADASSAH GREENSKY ED JANZEN

THE CAPITOL THEATRE PRESENTING PARTNERS: WINDSOR ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS AND WINDSOR ARTIST EXCHANGE / UMA LOFT.

SWIMMER

Nik Liguori, USA, digital, 4 min, 2023

A visual fantasia of synaptic processes and the reanimation of personal memory, set to a nautical soundscape first heard in a dream. “Go down to the sea …”

AN OPEN REFUSAL

Julia Yezbick, USA, S8mm > digital, 11 min, 2022

A collision of an infinity of traces, and a refusal to contain them.

FRESHWATER

dream hampton, USA, digital, 10 min, 2022

A disappearing Black city, flooded basements, and the fluid nature of memory.

ALL ROSES SLEEP (INVIOLATE LIGHT)

Alana Bartol and Bryce Krynski, Canada, digital, 14 min, 2022

An olfactory video that blends how bees and humans experience and use the land around us. Through the use of ultraviolet video, we see the prairie landscape from a bee’s point of view and with a scratch and sniff card we smell the prairie grasses and wildflowers.

SAFE CRASH #9

Michele Goulette, Canada, digital, 2 min, 2022

Non-sequential visual layering and juxtaposition of all things circular, with a hint of safe / not safe. Audio by Brent Lee.

HOURS AT SEA

Adam Sekuler, USA, 16mm > digital, 11 min, 2021

A reflection on the transient nature of moments, as captured through the lens of a ferry’s portholes. A nautical tone poem of sound and image relations.

PAST(OR)ALREADY

Calla Moya, Canada, 16mm, 6 min, 2022

Ten images from my grandma’s photo albums of my childhood, printed frame by frame through a digital-to-film process.

AS CLOSE AS YOUR VOICE CAN CALL

Derek Jenkins, Canada/USA, 16mm, 13.5 min, 2023

A film about language, about the way trauma inflects grief, and about learning to speak with the dead. I decided to perform a kind of ad hoc seance in which I learned to copy my mother’s signature exactly. This forgery opened me up to other vectors of memory.

THE RED GHETTO

Hadassah GreenSky, Odawa, digital, 4 min, 2021

The Cass Corridor neighbourhood of Detroit, otherwise known as the Red Ghetto, was home to several Native Americans / First Nations families from the 1940s to the 1970s. The stories of those times are now lived through their grandchildren.

WE ARE WE COME WE GO

Ed Janzen, Canada, digital, 1min, 2023

A meditation on time and acquaintances; a walk through a maze; the artist draws a circular path.

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 10 7:45PM

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION 5 AMY HALPERN NOUR OUAYDA MARYAM TAFAKORY KEVIN JEROME EVERSON FOROUGH FARROKHZAD

THE CAPITOL THEATRE PRESENTING PARTNERS: ART WINDSOR ESSEX, MOTHLIGHT MICROCINEMA, AND CANYON CINEMA.

UNOWNED LUXURIES #3 Amy Halpern, USA, 16mm, 3 min, 2020

The Unowned Luxuries films are about possession through the eyes. Based on the childhood perception (attributed to me as a five-year-old by my father) that “to see is to touch with the eyes,” these films propose a less toxic means of ownership. Actual ownership is overrated, as a desire and as a goal.

Amy Halpern (1953–2022). 40+ films from 1972–2022; major retrospectives at venues including Los Angeles Film Forum, Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico. Co-founder of New York Collective for Living Cinema (1972–82) and Los Angeles Independent Film Oasis (1975–80). Frequent collaborator on projects with filmmakers such as Pat O’Neill, Charles Burnett, Ken Jacobs, David Lebrun, and others.

THE SECRET GARDEN

Nour Ouayda, Canada/Lebanon, 16mm > digital, 27 min, 2023 The inhabitants of a city awake one morning to find that never-before-seen trees, plants, and flowers have suddenly erupted throughout the streets and in the squares.

Strange and mysterious events start taking place as Camelia and Nahla investigate the origins of these new and peculiar organisms.

Nour Ouayda (1991). Five films since 2019; screenings at venues including CPH:DOX Dokumentar Filmfestival, Cinéma du réel, Viennale, Shasha Movies, FIDMarseille, Beirut Art Center, Austrian Film Museum, Cinémathèque québécois, Toronto Arab Film Festival, and Documenta Madrid. Deputy Director of Metropolis Cinema Association (Beirut); co-editor of the Montréal-based online film journal Hors Champ. Lives in Beirut, Lebanon and Montréal, Québec.

MAST-DEL

Maryam Tafakory, Iran/England, digital, 17 min, 2023 Two women lie together in bed. As the wind bashes against the window, one recalls a past date to the cinema. The narrated scene cannot be conveyed through images. Layers of found and original footage are superimposed to fill in some of the cracks, the deletions, the limits of representation. A love song that would never pass through the censors, Mast-del is about forbidden bodies and desires inside and outside post-revolution Iranian cinema.

Maryam Tafakory (1987). 10+ films since 2104; screenings at venues including Cannes Directors Fortnite International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Locarno Film Festival, Museum of the Moving Image, Toronto International Film Festival, and New York Film Festival. ​ Tiger Short Award at International Film Festival Rotterdam (2018), two Aesthetica Emerging Art Prizes (2017 and 2019), Flaherty/Colgate Distinguished Global Filmmaker in Residence (2019), MacDowell Fellow (2022). Lives in Shiraz, Iran and London, England.

BOYD V. DENTON

Kevin Jerome Everson, USA, 16mm > digital, 3 min, 2023 Boyd v. Denton is the name of the landmark case that closed the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio in 1990.

Kevin Jerome Everson (1965). 200+ films since 1997; extensive screenings at major festivals worldwide; retrospectives at Centre Pompidou (2019), Harvard Film Archive (2018), Tate Modern (2017), Media City Film Festival, and Whitney Museum of American Art (2011).

Herb Alpert Award (2012), Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities (2019), Berlin Prize (2020). MCFF has screened more than 50 films by Everson since 2009.

MCFF Mobile Frames Filmmaker-in-Residence (2014).

Lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

THE HOUSE IS BLACK

Forough Farrokhzad, Iran, 35mm > digital, 22 min, 1962 The only film directed by trailblazing feminist Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad finds unexpected grace where few would think to look: a leprosarium whose inhabitants live, worship, learn, play, and celebrate in a self-contained community cut off from the rest of the world. Through ruminative voiceover narration drawn from the Old Testament, the Koran, and the filmmaker’s own poetry, and unflinching images that refuse to look away from physical difference, Farrokhzad creates a profoundly empathetic portrait of those cast off by society—a face-to-face encounter with the humanity behind the disease. A key forerunner of the Iranian New Wave, The House Is Black is a triumph of transcendent lyricism from a visionary artist whose influence is only beginning to be fully appreciated.—Janus Films Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967). One of Iran’s most significant modern poets, with multiple volumes published in her lifetime, including Reborn (1964). The House Is Black was the only film she directed in her short life before her untimely death in a car accident; the film won the Grand Prix from the International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (1964).

Farrokhzad’s poetry was banned in Iran for more than two decades after the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 10 9:30PM

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION 6 NATHANIEL DORSKY ROBERT BEAVERS HELGA FANDERL UTE AURAND

THE CAPITOL THEATRE PRESENTING PARTNER: COMMON GROUND GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO CINEMATHEQUE, AND CANYON CINEMA.

NAOS

Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 16mm, 12 min, 2022 A naos is the inner room of an ancient Greek temple in which the image of the deity celebrated by that temple is depicted (usually in the form of a statue of that deity).

Jacob, a young filmmaker, offered to help me with some shooting and became the centre of the film itself.

Nathaniel Dorsky (1943). 60+ films since 1964; screenings at venues including Austrian Film Museum, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, Media City Film Festival, Filmoteca Española, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, and Whitney Biennial (2012); complete retrospective at New York Film Festival (2015). Author of Devotional Cinema (2003). Emmy Award (1967), Guggenheim Fellowship (1997). Lives in San Francisco, California.

THE SPARROW DREAM

Robert Beavers, USA/Germany, 16mm, 29 min, 2022 Filmed in Berlin and Massachusetts. The turning pages of a child’s version of The Odyssey and the site of a Korean War monument in my hometown, Weymouth, suggest different sides of the same subject: nostos, or homecoming. The vision of Greece, first awakened in my childhood, remains a source. Despite different histories, one culture reflects another.

Each morning in Berlin, I remove the ashes from the ceramic oven in my room before lighting the new coals; each time I look at the new flames a different thought arises. It seems that there are an infinite number of qualities in fire.

Robert Beavers (1949). 25+ films since 1966; screenings at all major venues for artists’ film, including EXPRMNTL, Whitney Biennial (2017), and solo presentations at The Museum of Modern Art and Austrian Film Museum.

Guggenheim Fellowship (1972); MCFF Grand Prize (2014).

Founder of Temenos, an archive and screening series in Zürich and Greece dedicated to the films of Gregory Markopolous. Lives in Berlin, Germany.

SUPER 8 CONSTELLATIONS

Helga Fanderl, Germany, S8mm, 20 min, 2015–2023 A suite of eight recent films all exhibited on the original Super 8.

Spring Images, 3 min, 2023 Swings, 1 min, 2022 Playing Dogs, 1 min, 2021 Conversation at the Beach, 1.5 min, 2023

Ironing in the Street, 3 min, 2015 Pictures of Paris for Dr. G., 3 min, 2021 Zoo Animals and Architectures, 2 min, 2019 Circulation Tank, 3 min, 2017

Helga Fanderl (1947). 1000+ Super 8 films since the early 1980s; screenings at venues including Auditorium du Louvre, German Film Institute and Film Museum, New York Film Festival, Austrian Film Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema; films in permanent collections of Centre Pompidou and The Museum for Modern Art Frankfurt.

Coutts Contemporary Art Award (1991). MCFF retrospective artist (2006). Lives in Berlin, Germany.

TO BRASIL

Ute Aurand, Germany, 16mm, 18.5 min, 2023 A filmic encounter with Brazil, which Aurand visited for the first time in September 2022 for screenings of her films and Margaret Tait’s in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

[Aurand’s] work builds out from fragments, detours, refrains, and returns; her camera picks up discarded gestures and suspends them in time. Films are always moving, always fleeting, her work reminds us. These qualities are as fundamental to lived experience as they are to the cinema. Throughout Ute Aurand’s work we encounter a world animated by her mobile and dynamic camera, following, chasing, leading, and dissecting space.—George Clark Ute Aurand (1957). 45+ films since 1980; solo screenings at venues including Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Austrian Film Museum, Tate Modern, and (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico. Curator (1990–95) of Filmarbeiterinnen-Abend, a series of experimental films by women at Arsenal in Berlin; co-founder (1997) of Filmsamstag monthly film series at Kino Babylon in Berlin; editor and publisher of books on Marie Menken (1992) and Margaret Tait (1993). Lives in Berlin, Germany.

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 11 6:00PM

A WORLD OF MOVEMENT: FILMS OF SHARON LOCKHART

THE CAPITOL THEATRE PRESENTING PARTNERS: VISUAL STUDIES WORKSHOP, ART WINDSOR ESSEX AND LIAISON OF INDEPENDENT FILMMAKERS OF TORONTO.

A WORLD OF MOVEMENT: FILMS OF SHARON LOCKHART: Saturday, November 11, 2023 6:00 pm The Capitol Theatre, 121 University Ave. West, Windsor Pay What You Like admission Celebrated filmmaker and photographer Sharon Lockhart joins Media City Film Festival from Los Angeles to present a special selection of her films.

NŌ (2003) and Lockhart’s most recent film EVENTIDE (2022) are definitive works from the artist, representing a career of consistent engagement with some of contemporary cinema’s central preoccupations: the distinction between moving and still images, the tension between the “natural” and the staged, and above all the candid invitation to participate in concentrated acts of looking and listening.

Screening to mark the twentieth anniversary of its making, NŌ was originally inspired by the avant-garde practice of NŌ-no ikebana, a freestyle form of Japanese flower arranging. Filmed in a continuous take from a fixed camera angle, NŌ captures the precise movements of a Japanese farming couple, Masa and Yoko Ito, traversing horizontal fields of colour, and working the land as if covering the canvas in a living

NŌ, 16mm, 32 min, 2003 EVENTIDE, digital, 30 min, 2022

landscape painting. As Lockhart has explained, the film “highlights a relationship to nature and farming that is somewhat contrary to the overly mechanized large-scale agribusiness prevalent in the United States.”

In what is both a culmination and a departure, Sharon Lockhart’s latest film, EVENTIDE (2022), is a meditative, non-narrative long shot that uses choreography to explore landscape, communal relations, solitary searching, psychic endurance, and the play of light moving through darkness. An astounding number of stars emerge bright in the dusking sky, blazing as a distant corollary to the growing constellation of roving bodies scanning the rock-strewn beach by cell phone light for what we do not know. The streaking of shooting stars and gliding of satellites throws the otherwise measured pace into relief. Shot on the Swedish coast with a close-knit group of friends Lockhart has been involved with for years, EVENTIDE is concerned with grieving and the future.—Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

Sharon Lockhart (1964) is a photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker born in Norwood, Massachusetts. She received a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute (1991) and an MFA from Art Center College of Design (1993). She has completed 15+ films since 1997 which have been exhibited at festivals and museums around the world, including solo exhibitions at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Tomio Koyama Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gladstone Gallery, Blum & Poe, Bonniers Konsthall, The Power Plant, Baltimore Museum of Art, Venice Biennale, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Hammer Museum, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and Walker Art Center. Her films have screened at venues including REDCAT, Viennale, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berlinale, Jeu de Paume, Cineteca Madrid, Image Forum, Toronto International Film Festival, and Sundance Film Festival. Her work is in permanent collections of institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Getty Foundation, Tate Modern, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Yokohama Museum of Art. Radcliffe (2007–08), Guggenheim (2001) and Rockefeller (2000) Fellowships. Herb Alpert Award (2015). Lives in Los Angeles, California.

Program co-curated by Oona Mosna and Jeremy Rigsby

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 11 7:45PM

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION 7 JEAN-MARIE STRAUB DANIÈLE HUILLET MICHAEL SNOW MIKE STOLTZ MORGAN QUAINTANCE BEN RUSSELL

THE CAPITOL THEATRE PRESENTING PARTNERS: CINEMA LAMONT AND CANADIAN FILMMAKERS DISTRIBUTION CENTRE.

EVERY REVOLUTION IS A THROW OF THE DICE Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, France, 16mm > digital, 11 min, 1977

Straub and Huillet invited friends to recite Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance”, with its radically modern use of free verse, in a park alongside the wall in Père Lachaise cemetery where the last 147 men and women of the Paris Commune were lined up and shot dead in 1871.

It is not hard to understand why these ambitious filmmakers were drawn to Mallarmé’s late 19th-century poem, which casts readers adrift in a sea of elusive meanings, a playfully and hermetically cubist constellation of words that can assume myriad visual, aural, and symbolic forms.—MoMA There’s always a pool of blood somewhere that we’re walking in without knowing it.

There are always cadavers under a hill.—Jean-Marie Straub Jean-Marie Straub (1933–2022) and Danièle Huillet (1936–2006). 40+ films in collaboration from 1963–2006; complete retrospectives at venues including The Museum of Modern Art, Austrian Film Museum, Berlin Academy of Arts, and Centre Pompidou, among numerous screenings around the world across decades. Lifetime Achievement Awards from Locarno Film Festival (2017) and Venice International Film Festival (2006).

STANDARD TIME

Michael Snow, Canada, 16mm, 8 min, 1967 The camera swivels (pans) left to right, over and over again, then tilts, up and down, over and over again, establishing movement as such as the given condition of perception and existence … The bombarding impulses, through the “repeated” pans/tilts, permit (for each viewer, each time) different moments of reality to become relevant, exciting, etc. The speed at which the camera sees the given visually creates frustration at not being able to hold (the) experience, to pattern it in a conventional manner. … Snow’s film activates one’s internal mechanisms for grasping (idiosyncratically, in time) the substances one is faced with, it negates objective experience once and for all.—Peter Gidal Michael Snow (1928–2023). Worked in film, photography, sculpture, installation, holography, music; 25+ films from 1956–2019. Grand Prize for Wavelength (1967) at EXPRMNTL 4; major retrospectives at venues including Centre Pompidou and The Museum of Modern Art. Guggenheim Fellowship (1972), Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres (1995), Governor General’s Award (2000), Companion of the Order of Canada (2007).

Performance, screening, and re-issue of CCMC Vol. III LP at MCFF (2013). Greatly missed.

HOLOGRAPHIC WILL

Mike Stoltz, USA, 16mm, 5 min, 2023 A domestic swirl filmed while the building was being sold. How much longer can we afford to stay? A kaleidoscopic portrait of destabilization during the struggle to stay in a rent-controlled apartment amidst an affordable housing crisis.

Shot frame by frame, moving the camera between every image. Single frames move forward in time, creating afterimage combinations without superimpositions. A phased drum machine soundtrack emphasizes the percussive quality of the image.

With gratitude to neighbours and the Los Angeles Tenants Union Northeast Local.

Mike Stoltz (1981). 10+ films since 2010; screenings at venues including Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, and Courtisane Festival. Programmer of screenings at venues including Magic Lantern Cinema and Echo Park Film Center. 10+ cassettes, 7″s and split LPs since 2003 on labels including Rare Youth and Independent Woman Records. Lives between California and New York.

REPETITIONS

Morgan Quaintance, England, digital, 24 min, 2022 An exploration of recursive patterns, a series of repeated sequences, flickering images, and looping sounds. On the surface, Repetitions concentrates on inducing retinal excitement and states of anticipation, but telephone messages and speech provide a through line that speaks to physical labour, industrial work, and fragile bodies.

Morgan Quaintance (1979). 10+ films since 2018; screenings at venues including Curtas Vila do Conde, European Media Art Festival, Media City Film Festival, and Open City Documentary Film Festival. Frequent contributor of writing on contemporary art for publications including Art Monthly, The Wire, The Guardian, and frieze; host and producer (2012–2023) of Studio Visit on Resonance 104.4 FM. Lives in London, England.

AGAINST TIME

Ben Russell, USA/France, 16mm > digital, 23 min, 2022 Ben Russell presents two conceptions of time: a space of rapid succession and a space of simultaneity. Against Time celebrates the moment as an entity in which an infinite number of realities come together synchronistically.—Claire Lasolle

Ben Russell (1976). 30+ films since 2000; screenings and exhibitions at venues including Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Sundance Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, documenta 14, New York Film Festival, a 14th-century Belgian monastery, a police station basement, and a 17th-century East India Company building. Guggenheim Fellowship (2008); MCFF Grand Prize (2009). Currently lives in Marseille, France.

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 11 9:30PM

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION 8 JEANNETTE EHLERS KEVIN JEROME EVERSON MIRYAM CHARLES ANA VAZ ABIGAIL CHILD SARAH MALDOROR SIMONE LEIGH MADELEINE HUNT-EHRLICH PROGRAM INSPIRED BY AND CONSPIRING WITH FIRE BLOSSOMS, A DOSSIER BY YASMINA PRICE FOR THREE FOLD PRESS DETROIT.

THE CAPITOL THEATRE PRESENTING PARTNERS: THREE FOLD PRESS, TRINOSOPHES, AND CANYON CINEMA.

BLACK BULLETS

Jeannette Ehlers, Denmark, digital, 5 min, 2012 An homage to the Haitian revolution of 1791 when enslaved Africans rebelled against colonial rule. The slavery practiced by the French colonial administration is known as one of the cruellest periods of forced labour. The Haitian revolution set the scene for Haiti’s independence in 1804. In the video piece, walking human figures and their reflections are depicted against the sky on a mountain-top fort, which was built by the first Black Haitian monarch, Henri Christophe, at the start of the 19th century to defend independent Haiti against the French.—Espoo Museum of Modern Art

Jeannette Ehlers (1973). Works in photography, video, installation, sculpture, and performance; solo exhibitions at MOCAD, Moderna Museet (Stockholm), and Kunsthal Charlottenborg; screenings at venues including Festival Caribeén de l’Image and Brookyln Museum; Black Bullets permanently installed at Stockholm School of Economics.

Creator (with La Vaughn Belle) of I Am Queen Mary (2018), the first public statue of a Black woman in Denmark.

Lives in Copenhagen, Denmark

HOUGH 66

Kevin Jerome Everson, USA, digital, 7 min, 2023 The talented Fuego Mansa Mufasa, exhibiting the visuals of the 1966 Cleveland, Ohio uprising.

Kevin Jerome Everson (1965). 200+ films since 1997; extensive screenings at major festivals worldwide; retrospectives at Centre Pompidou (2019), Harvard Film Archive (2018), Tate Modern (2017), Media City Film Festival, and Whitney Museum of American Art (2011). Herb Alpert Award (2012), Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities (2019), Berlin Prize (2020). MCFF has screened more than 50 films

by Everson since 2009. MCFF Mobile Frames Filmmakerin-Residence (2014). Lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

SONG FOR THE NEW WORLD

Miryam Charles, Canada, 16mm > digital, 9 min, 2021 A castle, children’s games, the waves of a small coastal village in the Caribbean, an ancient cemetery … [Charles] solicits reality to feed her imagination and translate through the power of cinema her own questions about immigration, family ties, and the feeling of belonging. Lulled by soft Creole tunes, Song for the New World is a true waking dream where the Old and the New World converge, calling for contemplation and the nostalgia of exile.—Jason Burnham

Miryam Charles (1984). 10 films since 2015; screenings at venues including Toronto International Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, AFI FEST, Berlinale, and trinidad+tobago film festival; exhibitions at The Block Museum and University of Iowa. Films in permanent collections of Pérez Art Museum Miami and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

Lives in Montréal, Québec.

PSEUDOSPHYNX

Ana Vaz, Brazil, 16mm > digital, 8 min, 2020 Pseudosphinx is the scientific name of the fire caterpillars soon to become butterflies, or as they’re commonly (and auspiciously) called: witches. Pseudosphinx is at the same time sphinx, meaning inhuman chthonic monstrosity that spells charades; and pseudo, as in artificial, insincere, deceptive, unreal, illusive, mimetic.

Pseudosphynx keeps its meaning veiled, like a secret kept by those who save in their retinas the haptic impression of its fight.

Ana Vaz (1986). 15+ films since 2008; screenings at venues including Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, Curtas Vila do Conde, Visions du Réel, and New York Film Festival.

Film Society of Lincoln Center Kazuko Trust Award (2015), Grand Prize at MCFF (2015), MCFF Chrysalis Fellow (2020). Founding member of COYOTE collective, an interdisciplinary group working between ecology and political science. Originally from Brasilia, Brazil, currently lives in Lisbon, Portugal.

PREFACES

Abigail Child, USA, 16mm, 10 min, 1981 Prefaces is composed of wild sounds structured along entropic lines, placed tensely beside bebop rhythms, and a resurfacing narrative cut from dialogue with the poet Hannah Weiner. The tracks are placed in precise and asynchronous relation to images of workers, the gestures of the marketplace, colonial Africa, and abstractions, to pose questions of social force, gender relations, and subordination.

Abigail Child (1948). 60+ films since 1970; films in permanent collections of institutions including Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Whitney Museum of American Art, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and Centre Pompidou. Fulbright (1993) and Guggenheim (1996) Fellowships; Rome Prize (2010).

10+ volumes of poetry since 1983. Retrospective screening at MCFF (2004). Lives in New York, New York.

AND THE DOGS KEPT SILENT

Sarah Maldoror, France, 16mm > digital, 13 min, 1978 And the Dogs Kept Silent is based on recorded excerpts from the play Et les chiens se taisaient (1958) by the Martinican poet and politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008).

The life of a man, a revolutionary, relived by him at the moment of death in the middle of a great collective disaster. His existential dialogue with his mother reverberates around the African sculptures stored at the Musée de l’Homme, the Parisian museum full of colonial plunder whose director was the Surrealist anthropologist Michel Leiris. Sarah Maldoror had been planning to stage this tragic poem since the 1950s, finally interpreted here by Gabriel Glissant and the filmmaker herself, and also integrating three spectators in their game who take the role of silent witnesses.—Sabzian Sarah Maldoror (1929–2020). Co-founder (1956) of Les Griots, the first Black theatre company in France; relocated to Algeria and worked as assistant on Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966); made 40+ films of her own from 1968–1997, including Sambizanga (1972), one of the first African films directed by a woman; screenings at venues including Cannes Film Festival and Berlinale. L’ordre national du mérite (2011). Complete retrospective of films and archival exhibition at Palais de Tokyo and Musée de l’Homme (2021).

CONSPIRACY

Simone Leigh and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, USA, S8 & 16mm > digital, 25 min, 2022 An incantation of multiple architectures of the self for Black women … This tribute to the manual labours of creation, which closes with a gesture of Black feminist arson, forms a contact zone between the respective practices of sculpture and filmmaking.

The wandering hypnosis of Hunt-Ehrlich’s gorgeous black-and-white cinematography ritualizes the assertive elegance of Leigh’s craftsmanship of clay and stone … This shared composition is directed by a mesmerizing attentiveness to the haptics of sculptural labour … Leigh and Hunt-Ehrlich’s film performs an enchanting re-citation of Hands of Inge (1962), a documentary about the artist Ruth Inge Hardison. An actor and photographer, Hardison was most dedicated to her practice as a sculptor … Leigh and Hunt-Ehrlich have had a decade-long creative friendship, which makes this film an extension of an ongoing conversation that both also share with a larger constellation of Black women cultural workers.—Yasmina Price

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich (1987). 10+ films since 2013; screenings at venues including Tate Modern, Berlinale, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Venice Biennale (2022), Bienal de São Paulo (2023), and BlackStar Film Festival. Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” (2020), Princess Grace Award (2014), Creative Capital Award (2022), Herb Alpert Award (2023). Lives in New York, New York.

Simone Leigh (1967). Works in sculpture, video, and installation; exhibitions and screenings at venues including MoMA PS1, Kunsthalle Wien, Media City Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, and Whitney Biennial (2019).

Hugo Boss Prize (2018). First Black woman to represent the USA at the Venice Biennale (2022), where she was awarded a Golden Lion. Lives in New York, New York.

MOONSHINE: THE CELESTIAL FILMS OF KEVIN JEROME EVERSON June 15, 2023 – October 1, 2023

In partnership with Art Windsor-Essex (AWE), Media City Film Festival organized Kevin Jerome Everson’s first solo exhibition in Canada, curated by Greg de Cuir Jr. and Oona Mosna, with its inaugural installation at AWE’s flagship gallery in downtown Windsor.

MOONSHINE: The Celestial Films of Kevin Jerome Everson marked the first occasion that the internationally celebrated American artist’s complete body of astral-focussed films were presented together, offering a rare chance to experience his cinematic renderings documenting the shape, surface, and spatio-temporal movements of stellar objects, tracing their revolutionary and cosmic cycles, and capturing brief and brilliant encounters between lunar and solar bodies.

As stated by Dr. Terri Francis: ”Through Everson’s eyes, we share the perspective of a black artist following his curiosity and craft. Informed by conceptual art and realism, Everson’s work in moving images involves abstraction and reflexivity, and it is precisely, if ironically, the lack of cultural specificity or personal reference that centres blackness in a universal experience all of us can enjoy.”

MOONSHINE’s Windsor edition featured six works: Rough and Unequal: Oceanus Procellarum (2017), Polly One (2018), Polly Two (2018), Condor (2019), Black Vulture (2021) and the world premiere of the artist’s most recent lunar study, Thirty-Seven Degrees (2023). MOONSHINE is slated to tour in 2024-2025..

KEVIN JEROME EVERSON (1965) is an artist and filmmaker born in Mansfield, Ohio.

He has completed more than 200 films since 1997, quietly assembling one of the most remarkable collections of contemporary African American life ever committed to cinema. He received a BFA from University of Akron (1987) and an MFA from Ohio University (1990). His work has been exhibited widely at festivals, museums, and galleries internationally, including The Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and Venice International Film Festival. Everson has received midcareer film retrospectives at Cinéma du Réel / Centre Pompidou (2019), Harvard Film Archive (2018), Tate Modern (2017), and Media City Film Festival (2011). His work has also been featured at the 2008, 2012, and 2017 Whitney Biennials, the Sharjah Biennial (2013), and the Carnegie International (2018). He is a recipient of the Herb Alpert Award (2012), Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities (2019), Berlin Prize (2020), and Guggenheim (1996) and American Academy in Rome Fellowships (2020). Media City Film Festival has screened 50+ films by Everson since 2009. He is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Artwork courtesy the artist, trilobite-arts DAC and Picture Palace Pictures. Special thanks to Madeleine Molyneaux (Picture Palace Pictures), Travis Bird (Shotgun Cinema), Sophie Cavoulacos (MoMA), Art Windsor-Essex staff, and David Cyrenne (Caesars Windsor).

26TH MEDIA CITY FILM FESTIVAL / NOVEMBER 7 - 11 2023 / WINDSOR-DETROIT

THANK YOU

Miguel Armas and Mariya Nikiforova at Light Cone (Paris); Katherine Driscoll at Archive Simone Leigh (New York); Carmen Accaputo at Cineteca di Bologna; Brittni Collins at Ja’Tovia Gary Studio (Dallas); Brian Belovarac at Janus Films (New York); Dietmar Schwärzler, Gerald Weber, Daniela Zahlner, and Jonida Laçi at Sixpack Film (Vienna); John Klacsmann at Anthology Film Archives (New York); Christina Wimmer and Jonas Schenk at Galerie Gisela Capitain (Cologne); David Lebrun and Rosey Guthrie (San Francisco); Ryan Krivoshey and Kazu Watanabe at Grasshopper Film (New York); Diana Kluge at Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin); Steve Polta at San Francisco Cinematheque; Emir West at Sky Hopinka Studio; Angelika Ramlow at Arsenal (Berlin); Dylan Lustrin at neugerriemschneider (Berlin); Gene Speers, Jesse Brossoit and Winsor Ytterock at CFMDC (Toronto); Ben Balcom at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Serge Abiaad at La Distributrice de films (Montréal); Seth Mitter and Brett Kashmere at Canyon Cinema (San Francisco); Annouchka de Andrade (Paris); Yasmina Price (New York); Mark Toscano at Academy Film Archive (Hollywood); Tara Merenda Nelson at Visual Studies Workshop (Rochester); Sanne Jehoul at Square Eyes Film (Vienna); Chris Kennedy and Renata Mohamed at LIFT (Toronto); Elida Schogt and staff at Media Arts Network of Ontario; Mark Haslam and Barbara Gilbert at the Ontario Arts Council; Almudena Escobar López (Toronto); Herb Shellenberger (Bethlehem, PA); Parastoo Anoushapour (Toronto); and all of our valued partners and supporters in the Windsor-Detroit area: Leila Abdelrazaq and A’leetzia Burns at Allied Media; Debi Croucher at Indaba Marketing; Julia Galli, Tom Savage, Sheila Wisdom, and Gayle Allen at the Capitol Theatre; Jeremy Klaver at the Windsor Symphony Orchestra; Larry Baranski and staff at the Detroit Film Theatre; Fabio Costante at City of Windsor; Kylie Young and Becky at the Little Petal Flower Truck; Jordan Beaumier at Four Points Sheraton; Brian Yeomans at FHC Hotels & Resorts Inc; Tom Lucier, Joe O’Brien, and staff at Phog Lounge; Jennifer Matotek, Emily McKibbon, Stephen Nilsson, Spencer Montcalm, Tom Primeau, Beneau Plancher, Julie Rae Tucker, Nicole McCabe, Sean Chooti, Muriel Kahwagi, and Nadja Pelkey at Art Windsor-Essex; Cassandra Getty at Museum London; Teajai Travis and Stephen Mueller at Artcite Inc; Vivian I. at dream hampton studio; Alejandro Tamayo and Maria Mediratta at Arts Council Windsor and Region; Gordon Orr, Lynnette Bain, and Lionel Kernerman at Tourism Windsor-Essex Pelee Island; Walter Petrichyn and Lix Sellick at CJAM 91.5 FM; Stephanie Barnhard at Windsor Endowment for the Arts; Kyle Asquith, Garth Rennie, Mary Popovich, Martin Deck, and Dean Carson at the University of Windsor; Josh Gardner at Cinema Lamont; Jason Hulce at Klever Design; Andrea Slavik, Gustave Morin, Jenny Kimmerly, and Board at Common Ground Gallery; Julia Yezbick and Benjamin Gaydos at Mothlight Microcinema; Kristen Gallerneaux and staff at Henry Ford Museum; David Cyrenne at Caesars Windsor; Mary-Jo Sullivan at the Ontario Trillium Foundation; Lori and Paul Kimmerly at Standard Printing;

THANK YOU Darleen Service at All Star Gaming Centre; Sid Pandaya; Danielle Bowers; Tony Mosna; Liam Mosna; Peg Dorner; Greg Czuchnowsky; Bernard Helling; Kevin De Salliers; Regis Tellier; Jenny Bailey; Xander Sharma; Valentina Void; the House of Toast Film & Video Collective founders Deirdre Logue, Christopher McNamara, Britta Poisson, Kim Truchan, Dermot Wilson, and the original Venus Boys; all past and current board and committee members; and all of MCFF’s invaluable volunteers. And all those whose names were not available at press time. We appreciate you!

Media City Film Festival is a presentation of the House of Toast Film & Video Collective with assistance from Allied Media Projects (Detroit).

The 26th edition is made possible with generous financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, and All Star Gaming Centre. Additional sponsorship and in-kind support from Acción Cultural Española, Art Windsor-Essex, Common Ground Art Gallery, Full Aperture Systems, and the Detroit Film Theatre. Thank you also to members, donors, sponsors, presenting partner organizations, volunteers, and audience members.

26TH MEDIA CITY FILM FESTIVAL / NOVEMBER 7 - 11 2023 / WINDSOR-DETROIT

PARTNERS AND SPONSORS

PARTNERS AND SPONSORS

26TH MEDIA CITY FILM FESTIVAL / NOVEMBER 7 - 11 2023 / WINDSOR-DETROIT

FESTIVAL TEAM

Artistic Director/Lead Organizer Oona Mosna Assistant Director Jeremy Rigsby Administrative Coordinator/ Bookkeeping Philippa von Ziegenweidt Finance Committee Merry Ellen Scully Mosna, Cristina Naccarato, Douglas McLaren Development Team Oona Mosna, Cristina Naccarato, Sophie Cavoulacos, Joanna Raczynska, Madeleine Molyneaux Projection Apparatus Full Aperture Systems, James Bond Lead Festival Technicians James Bond, Travis Bird, Joaquin de la Puente Projectionist Kevin Rice International Program & Lead Curator Oona Mosna International Screening Committee / Pre-Screeners / Advisors Jeremy Rigsby (lead pre-screener), Aaron Glasser, Sophie Cavoulacos, Madeleine Molyneaux, Greg de Cuir Jr. Opening Night Organizers Oona Mosna, Greg Baise, Rebecca Mazzei, Forest Juziuk, Aaron Glasser, Brandon Walley, Larry Baranski, and staff at DIA/DFT Moonshine Exhibition Curators Greg de Cuir Jr. and Oona Mosna Regional Curator Brandon Walley

FESTIVAL TEAM Regional Engagement Committee Aaron Glasser, Czarina Mendoza, Garth Jackson, Brandon Walley Guest Services Coordinator Kamryn Cusumano Volunteer Coordinator Lauren Ridgewell Distribution Coordinator Shane Chiasson Venue Logistics Coordinator Merry Ellen Scully Mosna Capitol Theatre Staff Gayle Allen, Julia Galli, Jeremy Klaver, Tom Savage, Sheila Wisdom, and team Catalogue Designer Marc Ngui with assistance from Stephen Hargreaves Website Design & Development Spellerberg Associates: Marty Spellerberg, Alex Wen Photographer Jay Verspeelt Festival Trailers Scott Northrup Three Fold Press Detroit (MCFF Sister Institution) Rebecca Mazzei (Managing Editor), Oona Mosna (Film Editor) Copy Editor Greg Baise

2023 BOARD OF DIRECTORS President Douglas McLaren Treasurer Cristina Naccarato Secretary Greg Baise Board Members at Large Sophie Cavoulacos, Aaron Glasser, Joanna Raczynska, Forest Juziuk, Madeleine Molyneaux, Rebecca Mazzei, Roxanne Qussem, Frances Barber Festival Founders Deirdre Logue, Britta Poisson, Christopher McNamara, Kim Truchan, Dermot Wilson, and the Venus Boys

CONTACT MCFF Media City Film Festival 309 Chatham Street West Windsor, Ontario, Canada N9A 5M8 +1 519 973 9368 (Legal name: House of Toast Film & Video Collective)

American Donations

Canadian Donations

Tax-deductible receipts for all American donations made to MCFF can be obtained at:

Canadian donations to MCFF can be made at:

Allied Media Projects

CATALOGUE NOTES

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• Film durations are rounded to the nearest half-minute.

• Exhibition formats are those presented at MCFF 26; others may exist.

• Film descriptions are provided by the artists unless another source is cited.

• Film stills, artist portraits, and exhibition materials are provided by the artists except: Piece Mandala / End War (Paul Sharits) and Film No. 11 (Mirror Animations) (Harry Smith) stills and films from Anthology Film Archives (New York); Standard Time (Michael Snow) still, small portrait, and film from CFMDC (Toronto); Michael Snow large portrait by Michael Torosian; COP26FILM (Luke Fowler) still and film from Galerie Gisela Capitain (Cologne); Every Revolution Is a Throw of the Dice (StraubHuillet) still and film from Grasshopper Film (New York); Richland Descending, Hough 66, and boyd v. denton (Kevin Jerome Everson) stills and films from trilobite-arts DAC and Picture Palace Pictures (New York); Cultural Nationalism (Skip Norman) still, portrait, and film from Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin); Song for the New World (Miryam Charles) still, portrait, and film from La Distributrice de films (Montréal); And the Dogs Kept Silent (Sarah Maldoror) still, portrait, and film from Annouchka de Andrade (Paris); Narcisa Hirsch stills, portraits, and films from Tomas Rautenstrauch and Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch (Buenos Aires); The House Is Black (Forough Farrokhzad) still and film from Cineteca di Bologna and courtesy Janus Films; Harry Smith portrait by Friedl vom Gröller (Kubelka); Ayanna Dozier portrait by Jasmine Rose; Ed Halter portrait by Braden King; Christine Burchnall portrait by Christopher McNamara; Fox Maxy portrait by Owen Kolasinski; Sharon Lockhart portrait by Emily Berl; Jeannette Ehlers portrait by Roar Studio Milano; Straub-Huillet portrait by Angelo Palma; Abigail Child portrait by Tony Rinaldo; Malena Szlam portrait by Renata Mohamed; Sky Hopinka portrait from John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; Ja’Tovia Gary portrait by Jersean Gollatt; Ben Russell portrait by Jakov Munizaba; Simone Leigh portrait by Paul Mpagi Sepuya; Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich portrait by Michaela Blanc; Kevin Jerome Everson portrait

by Tom Daly; Laraaji large portrait by Balarama Heller; Laraaji small portrait by Jane Jones; Conspiracy (Simone Leigh & Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich) film courtesy the artists and Matthew Marks Gallery; Naos (Nathaniel Dorsky), Prefaces (Abigail Child),

By Halves, Unowned Luxuries #3, and 4 Fingers, 5 Toes (Amy Halpern) films from Canyon Cinema (San Francisco); Camera Test (Siegfried Fruhauf) and Drowned (Friedl vom Gröller Kubelka) films from Sixpack Film (Vienna); Mast-del (Maryam Tafakory) film from Square Eyes Film (Vienna); As close as your voice can call (Derek Jenkins) film from CFMDC (Toronto); Bouquets 31–40 (Rose Lowder) film from Light Cone (Paris).

• The following films are screened out of competition: Piece Mandala / End War (Paul Sharits), Film No. 11 (Mirror Animations) (Harry Smith), By Halves (Amy Halpern), Cultural Nationalism (Skip Norman), Every Revolution Is a Throw of the Dice (Straub-Huillet), Standard Time (Michael Snow), Black Bullets (Jeannette Ehlers), Prefaces (Abigail Child), And the Dogs Kept Silent (Sarah Maldoror), The House Is Black (Forough Farrokhzad), Super 8 Constellations (Helga Fanderl), Conspiracy (Simone Leigh & Madeleine HuntEhrlich), and all films of Ja’Tovia Gary, Narcisa Hirsch, and Sharon Lockhart.

Awards are granted in the following categories: Grand Prize, Second Prize, Third Prize, up to three Honourable Mentions, and Best Regional.