Polly One is a silent meditation on the cosmos, capturing a light dimmed but never extinguished. Made in memory of Bertha Everson, the filmmaker’s grandmother—who passed the day before the August 2017 solar eclipse.

Kevin Jerome Everson (Mansfield OH, 1965). Studies at University of Akron and Ohio University. 100+ films since 1997; screenings at Centre Pompidou (Paris), TIFF, Whitney Museum, MoMA (New York), etc. Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), Rome Prize (2001). Eighth appearance at Media City; 2014 Mobile Frames Filmmaker in Residence. Lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Defying gravity, a game of levitation becomes at once the possibility of magic, or a translation of an irrepressible desire for mastery.

Ana Vaz (Brasilia, Brazil 1986). Studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Le Fresnoy. 10+ films since 2008; screenings at Curtas Vila do Conde, Visions du Réel (Nyon), “Views from the Avant-garde” and “Projections” at the NYFF, etc. Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Kazuko Trust Award, Media City and Fronteira Festival (Goiânia) Grand Prizes (2015). Media City Award Winner (2017). Fourth appearance at Media City. Lives in Lisbon, Portugal.

“We could say that a firework is not different from a tree, or from a big artificial flower that grows, develops, flowers and dies in a few seconds. Withered, finally, it soon disappears in unrecognizable fragments. Well, let’s take this firework and make it last for a month, and we will have a flower with all the characteristics of other flowers. Or so, inverting the order of factors, may we imagine that the seed of a plant can explode like a bomb.” – Bruno Munari

Fields of newborn flowers, small gatherings of surviving bees, resistant plant species and new types of egg lay upon our shore, engaging us to dig and search for the meaning of such unexpected life…

Ana Vaz (Brasilia, Brazil 1986). Studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Le Fresnoy. 10+ films since 2008; screenings at Curtas Vila do Conde, Visions du Réel (Nyon), “Views from the Avant-garde” and “Projections” at the NYFF, etc. Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Kazuko Trust Award, Media City and Fronteira Festival (Goiânia) Grand Prizes (2015). Media City Award Winner (2017). Fourth appearance at Media City. Lives in Lisbon, Portugal.

Featuring crystallized magic markers and the kidney stone of a horse, the generously curated mineral collection of Mary Johnson comes to life in a manual labor of love for the process of archival procedure.

Jodie Mack (London, England 1983). Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 30+ films since 2003; screenings and exhibitions at 25FPS Festival (Zagreb), Harvard Film Archive, National Gallery of Art (Washington), IFF Rotterdam, and Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus). Associate Professor of Animation at Dartmouth College. Radcliffe Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard University (2018-2019). Lives in Hanover, New Hampshire.

“We hear of those formations of rocks which suddenly shift when the winds blow upon them, or else emit a soughing sound or give forth a mandolin-like music. People come from near and far to see them. And yet one’s initial impulse is to turn and run from such phenomena, no matter how much one may love music.” –Story of O, Ann Desclos

In The Glass Note, fragmented bodies, statuary, a beach marred by a storm, a virtual ocean, the phenomena of lithophonic stones, empty bear cages at an abandoned zoo, and a chair that served as a hearing aid come together to explore cinema’s inherent ventriloquism, fetish, and the boundarylessness of sense.

Mary Helena Clark (Santee SC, 1983). Studies at Emerson College and University of Illinois at Chicago. 10+ films since 2008; screenings and exhibitions include TIFF, NYFF, IFF Rotterdam, ICA and LUX (London), Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and Whitney Biennial. Second appearance at Media City. Lives in New York, New York.

Garden for the gardenless.

“And it’s little boxes all made into houses
That’s where they sleep, my friend
I sing a song of sixes, invoke the curse of witches
In a remote woodland

Ah ah ah ah
Oh oh oh oh” – Robyn G Shiels

It was perhaps the question of sound – the uncertainty of any synchronicity between what was seen and what was said that began an investigation into the relationship of sound to image. Dresden Dynamo is a film that I made without a camera – in which the image is the sound track – the sound track the image. A film document.

I will begin with a generalization. Resistance is many and different actions, and can apply to many and different political movements. It depends on a changed perception of ‘authority’. Emily Dickinson put it so succinctly: “I took one Draught of Life/ I’ll tell you what I paid/ Precisely an existence/ The market price, they said.”

Lis Rhodes (Cornwall, England 1942). Studies at the Royal College of Art. 10+ films since 1972; screenings and exhibitions at Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), Jeu de Paume (Paris), Tate Modern, ICA, and National Film Theatre (London), etc. Curator at London Filmmakers’ Co-op (1975-1976); co-founder of Circles: Feminist Film Distribution Network (1979). Lives in London, England.

“Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work – the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside – the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within – that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick – the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed…

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Jonathan Schwartz (New York NY, 1973). Studies at Massachusetts College of Art. 25+ films since 2000; screenings at IFF Rotterdam, EXiS (Seoul), NYFF, Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), San Francisco Cinematheque, etc. Fifth appearance at Media City.

“Shout, shout for joy, precious vessel!
Made marvellously and a marvel.” – היכלות רבתי

Light Licks are a series of films which are made frame by frame, often by flooding the camera with enough light to spill beyond the gate into frames left unexposed. Light Licks are ecstatic flicker films, inspired by improvised music, particularly jazz, and by accounts of mystic visionary practice.

Saul Levine (New Haven CT, 1943). 85+ films since 1964; screenings at numerous venues worldwide including recent retrospectives at MoMA (New York), The Nightingale (Chicago), etc. Former editor of New Left Notes; former programmer of MassArt Film Society for 40+ years. Fourth appearance at Media City including retrospective screening (2013). Lives in Boston, MA and “hardly ever leaves town.”

Told through recollections of youth, learning, lore, and departure, this is an imagined myth for the Xąwįska, or the Indian Pipe Plant – used by the Ho-Chunk to revive those who have fainted.

Sky Hopinka (Bellingham WA, 1984). Studies at Portland State University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. 9+ films since 2010; screenings at TIFF, Courtisane (Ghent), imagineNATIVE (Toronto), “Projections” at NYFF, and Whitney Biennial (2017), etc. Third appearance at Media City; Award Winner (2014). Lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.