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Art Windsor-Essex

Media City Film Festival’s 27th Virtual Edition

Art Windsor-Essex co-presents four films in the festival with MCFF!

Media City Film Festival’s 27th edition presents more than 70 films and digital artworks with nearly 50 virtual world premieres over the course of its online celebration: December 9–30, 2024.

Audiences can experience new films, world premieres, digital restorations, and historical masterpieces from legendary, award-winning, and emerging artists including Artavazd Péléchian, Ja’Tovia Gary, Mona Hatoum, Kamal Aljafari, Richard Serra, Jocelyne Saab, Madeleine Hunt–Ehrlich, Toshio Matsumoto, Sharon Lockhart, Mustafa Abu Ali, Skip Norman, Rose Lowder, Akram Zaatari, Sky Hopinka, Harun Farocki, Little Egypt Collective, Kevin Jerome Everson, Suneil Sanzgiri, and dozens more.

Highlights hail from Windsor-Detroit, Armenia, Colombia, Hong Kong, Palestine, Iran, Brazil, Japan, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, across Canada, and around the world.

 

 

Click here to screen!

Podwórka, Sharon Lockhart, USA, 16mm > digital, 31 min, 2009

Podwórka takes as its subject matter the courtyards of Łódź, Poland, and the children that inhabit them. A ubiquitous architectural element of the city, Łódź’s courtyards are the playgrounds of the children that live in the surrounding apartment buildings. Separated from the streets, they provide a sanctuary from the traffic and commotion of the city. Yet far from the overdetermined playgrounds of America, the courtyards are still very much urban environments. In six different courtyards throughout the city, we see parking lots, storage units, and metal armatures become jungle gyms, sandboxes, and soccer fields in the children’s world. A series of fleeting interludes within city life, Podwórka is both a study of a specific place and an evocation of the resourcefulness of childhood.

This film is available to stream globally.

This film is co-presented with neugerriemschneider and Art Windsor-Essex. 

Image credits: all artworks and stills courtesy neugerriemschneider © Sharon Lockhart. Portrait courtesy © James Benning. 

About the Filmmaker: Sharon Lockhart

Sharon Lockhart (USA) is a photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker born in Norwood, Massachusetts, in 1964. Celebrated for her highly conceptual yet elegant work, Lockhart’s practice involves collaborations that unfold over extended periods of time, often incorporating architectural elements, extensive periods of research, and long-term relationships with her subjects and collaborators. She received a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute (1991) and an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design (1993). Since 1997, she has completed more than 15 films which have screened at festivals and museums around the world, including 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, Walker Art Center, REDCAT, Viennale, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Jeu de Paume, Toronto International Film Festival, and Media City 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. She is a recipient of Radcliffe (2007–08), Guggenheim (2001), and Rockefeller (2000) Fellowships, as well as a Herb Alpert Award (2015). She lives in Los Angeles, California, where she teaches at CalArts.

A Black Screen Too, Rhayne Vermette, Canada, 16mm > digital, 2 min, 2024

A sequel to her earlier Black Rectangle, and reminiscent of Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren’s groundbreaking animations, Rhayne Vermette’s buzzing miniature A Black Screen Too is a burst of colour and movement undercut by darkness.—Toronto International Film Festival 

After [Vermette’s 2014 film] Black Rectangle was created, a racist joke was found to have been inscribed in [Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 painting] Black Square, referencing a comic by French artist Alphonse Allais.—Joshua Minsoo Kim

This film is available to stream globally.

This film is co-presented with Art Windsor-Essex and Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. 

Image credits: artworks, portraits and stills courtesy the artist © Rhayne Vermette.

About the Filmmaker: Rhayne Vermette

Rhayne Vermette (Canada) is a filmmaker and multimedia artist born in Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes, Manitoba, in 1982. Her work employs collage, photography, and analogue filmmaking techniques, emphasizing themes of place, time, and rhythm through layers of fiction, animation, re-enactments, and what the artist describes as “divine interruption.” She received a BA in Literature from the University of Winnipeg (2005) and studied architecture at the University of Manitoba. Her films, including take my word (2012), Black Rectangle (2014), Extraits d’une famille (2015), and Domus (2017), have screened at museums, festivals, and galleries internationally including New York Film Festival, Canadian Film Institute, Melbourne International Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Mar del Plata International Film Festival, Viennale, Jeonju International Film Festival, Valdivia International Film Festival, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, and Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective. She is the recipient of a Mosaic Film Fund Award from Winnipeg Film Group (2011), a PLATFORM Photography Award from PLATFORM Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts (2019), and her first feature film Ste. Anne (2021) was awarded the Toronto International Film Festival’s Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Feature Film. She was shortlisted for the 2024 Sobey Art Award; her accompanying exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada continues to April, 2025. She lives and works in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

 

A Stone’s Throw, Razan AlSalah, Palestine/Canada, digital, 40 min, 2023

Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice from land and labour. He is displaced from his birthplace, Haifa, seeking refuge in Beirut, and again to Zirku Island for work on an offshore oil platform and work camp in the Gulf. A Stone’s Throw trespasses borders to reveal an emotional and material proximity between the extraction of oil and labour in the region and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. The film rehearses a history of the Palestinian resistance when, in 1936, the oil workers of Haifa blew up a BP pipeline.

This film is available to stream globally.

This film is co-presented with Art Windsor-Essex and Prismatic Ground. 

Image credits: all artworks, portraits, and stills courtesy the artist © Razan AlSalahRazan 

About the Filmmaker: Razan AlSalah

Razan AlSalah (Palestine/Canada) is a Palestinian filmmaker, artist, and teacher born in Beirut in 1987. Her films engage with the material aesthetics of appearance and disappearance of indigenous bodies, narratives, and histories in colonial image worlds. She thinks of her creative process as a circle of relations with artists, friends, family, technology, images, plants, objects, sounds, and the unknown. She received an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University (2017). Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including HotDocs, Melbourne International Film Festival, Glasgow International Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, New Filmmakers New York, FIDMarseille, Prismatic Ground, Beirut International Film Festival, Sharjah Film Forum, and Wexner Center for the Arts, winning awards from Ann Arbor Film Festival and Days of Cinema Palestine, among others. She was a Knight Foundation New Frontier Fellow at Sundance Film Festival (2018), an Arab Fund for Arts and Culture Grantee (2020), and a mentor at the CAMRA Mellons Fellows Program at the University of Pennsylvania (2018). Her films are in the permanent collections of Sursock Museum in Beirut. She has curated film programs for Cinémathèque québécoise and contributed articles to C-Mag and other journals. She lives and works in Montréal/Tiotiake, where she teaches Intermedia and Moving Images at Concordia University.

 

Quiet as It’s Kept, Ja’Tovia Gary, USA, S8 & 16mm > digital, 26 min, 2023

Quiet as It’s Kept (2023) is a contemporary cinematic response to The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s first novel. An evocative illustration of the everyday particulars of colourism and its ravaging effects on the intramural, the film collages together vintage Hollywood, direct animation, original Super 8 and 16mm film footage, and repurposed social media clips. The film considers questions around the book’s themes of internalized and externalized anti-blackness in contemporary culture.

Ja’Tovia Gary is featured with two additional films in the Spotlight Section of the 27th Media City Film Festival.

This film is available to stream globally.

This film is co-presented with Art Windsor-Essex and Kinopravda Institute. 

Image credits: artworks and stills courtesy of the artist © Ja’Tovia Gary. Portrait courtesy © JerSean Golatt.

About the filmmaker: Ja'Tovia Gary

Ja’Tovia Gary (USA) is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation born in Dallas in 1984. Gary’s multivalent works seek to trouble notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity, applying what scholar and cultural critic bell hooks terms “an oppositional gaze” as both maker and critical spectator of moving images. She received her MFA in Social Documentary Filmmaking from the School of Visual Arts, New York (2014). Her work has been exhibited at festivals and museums worldwide including The Museum of Modern Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Austrian Film Museum, New Orleans Film Festival, Hammer Museum, Open City Documentary Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Anthology Film Archives, Film at Lincoln Center, and Harvard Film Archives, winning awards from Locarno Film Festival and BlackStar Film Festival, as well as from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Block Museum and Studio Museum in Harlem. She has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Creative Capital, Field of Vision, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She has taught courses in direct animation and cameraless filmmaking at Mono No Aware in Brooklyn and was a founding member (2013) of New Negress Film Society, a collective of Black women filmmakers. She lives and works in Dallas, Texas.