Media City Film Festival 25th Edition

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Media City Film Festival (MCFF), Windsor-Detroit’s annual international festival for film and digital art, announces the full scope of its 25th anniversary virtual edition: February 8–March 1, 2022.

In an act of global solidarity, all 70+ films featuring some of cinema’s most ardent pioneers are available to view for free in full open access globally for the duration of this amazing virtual event: mediacityfilmfestival.com 

MCFF 2022 features an eclectic selection of films streaming across three sections: International, Spotlight and Regional. Audiences will gain unfettered access to incredible new works, world premieres, restorations, amateur films, and historical masterpieces from legendary artists and filmmakers including Tracey Moffatt, Sergei Parajanov, Sky Hopinka, Ulysses Jenkins, Cecilia Vicuña, Carolee Schneemann, Tony Cokes, Ute Aurand, Karpo Godina, and dozens more. Highlights hail from Windsor-Detroit, Colombia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Armenia, Brazil, Sri Lanka, across Canada and around the world.   

Guggenheim Fellow and Princess Grace Award recipient Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) returns to the festival with his latest, Kicking the Clouds (2022), fresh from its Sundance world premiere. Rich in metaphor and highly poetic, the film is a moving portrait of the director’s family lineage, centered on the voices and experiences of its matriarchs. Utilizing a 50-year-old recording of his grandmother learning the Pechanga language from her mother, Hopinka beautifully interweaves poetic verse, family dialogue, and vivid renderings of the Pacific Northwest landscape to honour the lives of three remarkable women. Sky is a previous MCFF award winner (2014). His recent breakout feature maɬni (2020) was supported by MCFF’s Chrysalis Fellowship. “In Mr. Hopinka’s art, wherever a tribe gathers is a place to be,” writes the New York Times.

MCFF presents the virtual premiere of a new digitization of Sodom (1989-1994) by the late, great American filmmaker Luther Price. This digitization has been minted by Anthology Film Archives from their recent film restoration expressly for this event. Dubbed “the magician of cinema,” and celebrated by the likes of Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, and Andrei Tarkovsky, acclaimed Armenian director Sergei Parajanov makes an appearance with three recently restored films, courtesy of partners The Hamo Bek-Nazarov ProjectNational Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film CenterNational Cinema Center of ArmeniaGeorgian Film, and Fixafilm with support from Kino Klassika. Work by feminist icon Carolee Schneemann, Slovenian director Karpo Godina, Dame of the Order of Australia Tracey Moffatt, and L.Franklin Gilliam’s newly restored Now Pretend (1992), courtesy of Cinenova, are among the many international gems on view. 

Closer to home, Daïchi Saïto’s 35mm masterpiece earthearthearth (2021) has been blazing a global trail in recent months, garnering unanimous praise from critics the world over during its in-person release at festivals including TIFF and NYFF. Funded and produced by MCFF as part of a commissioning project in the expanses of the Atacama Desert and the Andean Mountains in Chile and Argentina, its screening at the festival represents the first opportunity for global audiences to see it online without restrictions. “A major film from a singular artist, earthearthearth is a pulsing, painterly tour de force” (MUBI).

Filmed in Windsor-Detroit on 35mm film, Argentinian filmmaker Pablo Mazzolo’s The Newest Olds (2022) will make its world premiere at MCFF. The work transforms Detroit’s iconic cityscapes, collapsing the physical, political, and sensory boundaries between Canada and the United States through dazzling, alchemical in-camera and optical printing techniques. 

Created with assistance from MCFF’s Chrysalis Fellowship, one of many programs through which the festival has been instrumental in developing and supporting new film productions, Surface Rites (2021) by Ryan Ferko, Parastoo Anoushahpour, and Faraz Anoushahpour (Iran/Canada) also screens concurrently with its appearance at the 72nd Berlinale.

Whitney Biennial artist and member of Little Pine First Nation Thirza Cuthand explores the ethics of representation, and the nature of the sacred through the lens of traditional Indigenous healing practices, and ruminations on our current pandemic situation with her recent film, Medicine Bundle (2020).

Suneil Sanzgiri’s Golden Jubilee (2021) unfolds outwardly, following a familial journey led by a Devchar spirit from Goa, India to engage the viewer in a series of poignant questions about the history of colonial occupation both past and present. The film deftly employs 3D surveillance technologies, used by mining companies to map locations for iron ore extraction, to create renderings of the filmmaker’s ancestral home. 

American Academy at Rome Fellow and Berlin Prize recipient Kevin Jerome Everson returns with a single film, Partial Differential Equation (2020), representing his ninth screening at MCFF since 2009. Everson will have five films streaming on Criterion this month, including MCFF’s 2010 Opening Night film Erie (2010) and MCFF prize-winning work Fe26 (2014).  

Onyeka Igwe’s a so-called archive (2020) imagines the “lost” films from the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (2002–2009) and the Colonial Film Unit (1932–1955), using distinctive soundscapes, choral arrangements, and a radio play to construct a disembodied tour of an archive building. Igwe is part of 2021 Turner Prize-nominated ​​Black Obsidian Sound System, a collective of queer, trans, and nonbinary people of colour involved in radical art, sound, and activism in London, UK.

The selection curated by Greg de Cuir Jr (Serbia) contains seminal classics, including L.Franklin Gilliam’s Sapphire and the Slave Girl (1995), Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries (1990), Tony CokesNo Sell Out (1995), Ulysses Jenkin’s Mass of Images (1978), among many other.

The program curated by Almudena Escobar López includes Beatriz Santiago Muñoz's The Raven, the Pit and the Mare (2021); Cecilia Vicuña’s Paracas (1983) and What is Poetry to You? (1980); Bleeding Heart (1993) by Ximena Cuevas; Teresa (2017) by Tânia Dinis, and many more!

The festival’s rich and varied virtual program also includes much more and will be available to view through March 1, 2022. MCFF’s new site construction was expertly developed, designed, and managed by Spellerberg AssociatesHour Studio, and CineSend for your screening pleasure: mediacityfilmfestival.com 

MCFF 25 is presented in partnership with 40+ local and international organizations. We highly recommend that you visit these spaces, virtually and in person. MCFF plans to present an in-person anniversary festival as soon as public safety allows.  

MCFF 2022 ARTISTS: ★ Morgan Quaintance ★ Peter Tscherkassky ★ Onyeka Igwe ★ Malena Szlam ★ Pablo Álvarez Mesa ★ Chris Kennedy ★ Ana Vaz ★ Cecilia Vicuña ★ Mary Helena Clark ★ Ute Aurand ★ Ulysses Jenkins ★ Michael Robinson ★ Ben Russell ★ Carolee Schneemann ★ Rajee Samarasinghe ★ Suneil Sanzgiri ★ Ben Rivers ★ Eva Giolo ★ Beatriz Santiago Muñoz ★ John Price ★ Lindsay McIntyre ★ Sky Hopinka ★ Jayne Parker ★ Ross Meckfessel ★ Friedl vom Gröller (Kubelka) ★ Zachary Epcar ★ Parastoo Anoushahpour ★ Faraz Anoushahpour ★ Ryan Ferko ★ Alexandra Cuesta ★ Tracey Moffatt ★ Pablo Mazzolo ★ Kevin Jerome Everson ★ Riar Rizaldi ★ Shireen Seno ★ Rhea Storr ★ Simon Liu ★ Sílvia das Fadas ★ Thirza Cuthand ★ Sergei Parajanov ★ Luther Price ★ L.Franklin Gilliam ★ Tony Cokes ★ Ximena Cuevas ★ Tânia Dinis ★ Michael Hubbard ★ The ManosBuckius Cooperative ★ bree gant ★ Sally Lawton ★ Michele Goulette ★ Scott Northrup ★ Jack Cronin ★ Derek Jenkins ★ Bawaadan Collective ★ Joseph Bernard ★ Christopher Bissonnette ★ Garth Jackson ★ Kayla Anderson ★ Natasha Beste ★ Paul Echeverria ★ Daïchi Saïto ★ Karpo Godina ★

All screenings and events are FREE: https://mediacityfilmfestival.com/

Fechas: 

De Martes, Febrero 8, 2022 (Todo el día) hasta Martes, Marzo 1, 2022 (Todo el día)

Categoría: 

Fechas: 

De Martes, Febrero 8, 2022 (Todo el día) hasta Martes, Marzo 1, 2022 (Todo el día)