2022–2023

Ephraim Asili (USA) is an African-American artist, filmmaker, and traveler whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. He studied at Temple University and received his MFA in film and video arts from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. His films have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Black Star Film Festival, Flaherty Film Seminar, Rotterdam, Milan and New Orleans Film Festivals, NY Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Whitney Museum of American Art, and countless other museums, festivals, and microcinemas internationally. Asili was a Media City Film Festival Mobile Frames Filmmaker in Residence (2016), an MCFF Grand Prize Winner (2017), and a Guggenheim Fellow (2021). His feature film The Inheritance premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and New York Film Festival in 2020, and won the Grand Prize at Cinema du Réel in Paris (2021). Writing about his work has recently appeared in Hyperallergic, Vogue, USA Today, Artforum, etc. He is a professor in Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College, and lives in Hudson, New York. Asili’s forthcoming Chrysalis-supported project focuses on the life and work of Don and Moki Cherry.

An electrifying voice in American independent cinema, the filmmaker, artist, and DJ Ephraim Asili believes that moving images can revolutionize our perception of the world. His body of work attests to this conviction. Since he began making films more than a decade ago, he has delved into the complexities of the Black experience and challenged cinematic forms and conventions. – Beatrice Loayza

> Integral Whirls: A Dossier on Ephraim Asili 

>  New York Times Review (2021)

> Lessons in Liberation (Criterion)

>  Interview with Dennis Lim at NYFF (2020)

> Walker Art Center: The Year According to Ephraim Asili

2022–2023

Terra Long (Canada) is an artist, filmmaker, and editor. She received her BFA in Women’s Studies and Film Production from the Simone de Beauvoir Institute & Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University (2008) and her MFA in Film Production from York University (2014). Her work playfully engages with the materiality of celluloid by way of botanical curiosity, excessive landscapes, deep time, and cultural imaginaries. Long is a member of the Independent Imaging Retreat Collective (The Film Farm) in Mount Forest, Ontario, and the Film for Artists Collective on the Toronto Islands. Her films, including 350 MYA (2016), Horses in the year of the dog (2018), and The Stammering Alphabet (2019), have screened at venues around the world, including the Toronto International Film Festival, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, EXiS Festival, Images Festival, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, LA Film Forum, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Edinburgh International Film Festival, and two previous editions of Media City Film Festival. She has also edited numerous feature-length films which have gone on to win numerous awards nationally and internationally, including Landfall at DOC NYC (2020) and After the Last River (2014), which was awarded Best Canadian Feature at Planet in Focus. Long was a Mobile Frames Filmmaker in Residence and recipient of the Ontario Arts Council’s Chalmer Fellowship in 2016. She lives and works on the traditional territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (British Columbia, Canada). 

> ARTIST’S WEBSITE

> FILM FOR ARTISTS COLLECTIVE

> CFMDC DISTRIBUTION 

2022–2023

Christina Battle (Canada) is an artist, curator, filmmaker, writer, and organizer. She received a BSc from the University of Alberta with specialization in Environmental Biology (1996), an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (2005), and a PhD in Art and Visual Culture from the University of Western Ontario (2019). Battle’s practice examines the concept of disaster: its complexity and the intricacies that are entwined within it. Her film and media artworks have been exhibited at venues internationally, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, EXiS Festival, Musée d’art moderne André Malraux, International House Philadelphia, Berlinale, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Harbourfront Centre. She was a contributing editor to INCITE Journal of Experimental Media and a member of the collectives Mice Magazine, re:assemblage, and Nothing To See Here. She is currently the online editor for BlackFlash Magazine, which is dedicated to presenting critical opinions, urgent issues, and divergent artistic practices. Battle lives and works in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta), located within the Aspen parkland, a transitional biome where prairie and boreal forest meet. 

Multidimensional by definition, disaster is seen as a series of intersecting processes including social, environmental, cultural, political, economic, and technological, which are implicated not only in how disaster is caused but also in how it manifests, is responded to, and overcome. Through this research I consider the ways in which disaster, as both subject and framework, might be utilized as a tactic for social change and as a tool for reimagining how dominant systems might radically shift. – Christina Battle 

> ARTIST’S WEBSITE

> TO RECIPROCATE ALL THEY FREELY OFFER

> OTHER PLACES: A CONVERSATION

> BLACKFLASH MAGAZINE

2022–2023

Julieta María (Colombia/Canada) is an artist, performer, and filmmaker of Colombian and Palestinian descent. Her work experiments with the body, poetic gesture, and storytelling to mine the tensions between inhabiting and observing landscapes and the hidden traces of history embedded in place. She received a BSc in Computer Engineering from Universidad del Norte (1994) and undertook postgraduate studies in Literature at Universidad del Atlántico (1997). She went on to receive a BFA Honours in Visual Arts (2004) and an MFA in Visual Arts (2010) from York University. Her films, artworks, and performances have been exhibited at galleries, festivals, and museums around the world, including Museo Banco de la República, Queens Museum, Hamburg International Short Film Festival, Salvador Allende Festival for Peace, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Images Festival, Gardiner Museum, Pleasure Dome, the Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics, and the Edinburgh International Film Festival, among others. She was a founding member and Director of e_fagia (2004–2011), a Toronto-based organization encouraging reflection on new media and digital art within the Latin American and diasporic communities. She has presented workshops, lectures, and curatorial projects at Museo de Arte Moderno de Barranquilla, Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, La Cúpula Galería de Arte | Media Lab, Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, Bandung Center for New Media Arts, and A Space Gallery. She lives and works in Toronto. 

> ARTIST’S WEBSITE

> PRECARIOUS LANDSCAPES: A STUDIO VISIT WITH JULIETA MARIA

> VTAPE

> CECILIA ARANEDA: JULIETA MARIA

2022–2023

Alexandre Larose (Canada) is a French-Canadian filmmaker born in Montréal, Québec. He received his BEng in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Sherbrooke (2001); a BFA from Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema (2006); and an MFA in Studio Arts, Film Production from Concordia University (2013). His moving-image practice investigates phenomena of appearance and representation as translated by the media of optics and celluloid. His approach relies on a methodical stripping-out of layers embedded in both the live subjects and the technique that translates them into visual artifacts. Larose’s films have garnered numerous awards, including the Grand Prix and Critics’ Award from 25FPS Festival, Fuji Award from EXiS Festival, Grand Prix from Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, and the International Jury Award for Best Film, Hamburg International Short Film Festival. His films have screened widely at the George Eastman Museum, Belarusian State University, Media City Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, European Media Art Festival, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, Foundation for Contemporary Art (Kiev), Museum of the Moving Image, International Film Festival Rotterdam, IMAGE Forum, Mostra de Cinema Periférico, Message to Man International Film Festival (St. Petersburg), and hundreds more venues internationally. 

The idea of something eternal casts aside the linear concept of time: the one that says that life is a succession of moments—past, present, and future—in relentless, crushing progress. The eternal return speaks of the value of the moment, more than a simple transition: each moment is unique and eternal; it is the full meaning of all existence and an affirmation of life. This is a philosophical concept that seems to be at the heart of the Canadian Alexandre Larose’s filmmaking, in which the concentration of all moments into one, and an insistence on gestures, paths, and motifs, is essential. Variations on the same motif and serial work make up the backbone of his work, which combines a certain scientific meticulousness with outcomes of staggering plasticity and evocative power. It is an exploration of the medium of photochemical cinema and its possibilities which, like the moments he captures in his films, seems to know no end. – Elena Duque

> ARTIST’S WEBSITE

> BLACKFLASH MAGAZINE

> CIRCUIT CAST

> WRO ART CENTER

2022–2023

Ben Donoghue (Canada) is an artist, filmmaker, publisher, curator, and cultural worker of Euro-settler heritage currently living on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Chippewa, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (Toronto, Ontario). Working primarily in analogue media, his practice explores a variety of themes and subjects, including histories of political and cultural resistance, the effects of macro-economic forces on the landscape, and the biopolitical subject in the built environment. His films and performances, including Nostalgia of my Pier (2018), Pierre Radisson – Fjord and Gulf (2017), Towers – Barranquilla (2016), and the series Downcast Eyes #1–12 (2004–2006) have been exhibited at galleries, festivals, and museums internationally, including Cinémathèque Québécois, Hamburg Short Film Festival, Duke University, Arkipel Film Festival, Toronto Palestine Film Festival, Images Festival, and the Montreal Underground Film Festival, among others. Selected curatorial projects have been presented at EXiS Festival, Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Museum London, Pacific Cinematheque, Casa del Popolo, and elsewhere. Donoghue has been a leading advocate for artist-run collectives and media arts organizations in Canada for nearly two decades, serving as Executive Director of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (2007–2013), and the Media Arts Network of Ontario (2013–2022). He is currently undertaking a series of analogue film productions in Ireland, Newfoundland, and Colombia, slated for release in 2023–2025.   

Ben Donoghue has remained a stalwart of the underground and experimental film scenes for decades, preferring to operate below the radar and beyond the margins. His many radical and invaluable contributions, both artistic and organizational, have remained largely hidden from global view. Regardless, Donoghue’s tireless efforts have resulted in the continued vitality of artists’ cinema in Canada. His own multivalent, chiefly analogue film practice encompasses expanded cinema projects, installation, recurring series, and short and long-form productions. His recent feature, Pierre Radisson – Fjord and Gulf (2017), named after a founding member of the colonial enterprise the Hudson’s Bay Company, tracks the navigational routes, daily activity, and environmental path of a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker through the Saguenay Fjord and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. – MCFF     

> ARTIST’S WEBSITE

> MAKING WAVES: SLOW OBSERVATIONAL FILM WITH BEN DONOGHUE

> CULTURAL MINING: PIERRE RADISSON: FJORD AND GULF

2022–2023

Pablo Mazzolo (Argentina) is a filmmaker and educator born in Buenos Aires in 1976. He works exclusively in analogue film formats exploring the optical and chemical properties of the medium, with a particular focus on human and natural landscapes. His work has tackled themes such as indigenous sovereignty, the spectre of military dictatorship, extinction and environmental catastrophe. He received an MFA from the University of Buenos Aires (2001). His films, including Diego La Silla (2000), Oaxaca Tohoku (2011), El Quilpo sueña cataratas (2012), Fotooxidación (2013), and Ceniza Verde (2019), have been widely exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries internationally, including Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Melbourne International Film Festival, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Block Museum of Art, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Mar del Plata International Film Festival, Brooklyn Museum, The Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Punto de Vista Festival, Frontera Sur International Non-Fiction Festival, Museo Tamayo, Valdivia International Film Festival, FAMU International, The Latin American Museum of Art Buenos Aires, Chicago Underground Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque, The Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film, (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico, and Cinemateca Madrid, among many others. His film Conjectures (2013) won Grand Prize, Media City Film Festival (2013); Fish Point (2015) was awarded the Kodak Cinematic Vision Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival (2016); and Cineza Verda (2019) was awarded Grand Prize, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (2019). Mazzolo is Professor at the National University of Quilmes, works as a freelance documentary film editor, and teaches workshops on visual perception and image creation to young people living with autism. He lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina

>EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA

>MUBI

>CCCB

2021–2022

Ayo Akingbade (UK) is an artist working predominantly with moving image, addressing notions of power, urbanism, and stance. Interested in the fluid boundaries between the self and the other, she gathers local and cultural experiences in intimate and playful interpretations. She is best known for her documentary shorts, including Street 66 (2018), about Ghanaian housing activist Dora Boatemah and her work in Brixton, London. Her film Tower XYZ (2016) received a Special Mention Award at International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and won the inaugural Sonja Savić Award at Alternative Film/Video Festival, Belgrade. Her work has been presented in numerous exhibitions at key galleries and museums, including the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts. Akingbade has been featured in articles for Art Viewer, ArtDaily and ARTnews. Akingbade is a recipient of the Sundance Ignite Fellowship (2018) and exhibited in Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2018). She is a graduate of London College of Communication and is currently studying at Royal Academy Schools. 

The most important validation for any artist who is “realistic” and “concerned with the Black community” is exemplified in the films of Ayo Akingbade through her clear authorship, unique point of questioning, and her earnest personal motivations for story-telling. Her filmography so far shows how Black art might begin from the documentation within the category of Blackness and push out to the margins of constructive differences. —Rianna Jade Parker

>ARTIST’S WEBSITE 

>NEW ARTIST FOCUS: RIANNA JADE PARKER ON AYO AKINGBADE

>DISTRIBUTION AT LUX

>MUBI ARTIST INTRODUCTION

>MOMA DOC FORTNIGHT

2019–2022

Christopher Harris (USA) is an artist whose films and video installations read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. His work employs manually and photo-chemically altered appropriated moving images, staged re-enactments of archival artifacts and interrogations of documentary conventions. His current project is a series of optically-printed 16mm experimental films in conversation with canonical works of African-American literature. Recent exhibitions include a career retrospective at the Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival, and solo screenings at the Locarno Film Festival, Images Festival, and Encontro de Cinema Negro. Additional exhibitions have been held at the Brakhage Center Symposium, the Gene Siskel Film Center,  Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, UnionDocs, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Artists’ Film Biennial at the Institute of Contemporary Art, IFF Rotterdam, the Viennale, among many others. Harris received a 2019-20 Artist Residency Award from the Wexner Center for the Arts and was a featured artist at the 2018 Flaherty Seminar. He is the recipient of a 2017 Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship and a 2015 Creative Capital grant. Interviews with Harris have appeared in BOMB Magazine, Film Quarterly and numerous other print and online journals. Writing about his films has appeared in periodicals such as CinemaScope Magazine and Millennium Film Journal. He is Associate Professor, Head of Film & Video Production at the University of Iowa.

Artist filmmaker Christopher Harris uses a bold, experimental filmmaking technique to excavate repressed histories and cultural memories. Fully aware of the sweep of avant-garde film as described by Princeton Professor Emeritus P. Adams Sitney in his renowned book “Visionary Film,” Harris has developed his own ingenious form of cinema to, in his words, “counter-act Western hegemony over African culture in the New World.” –Lynn Sachs

Artist Links

>BOMB MAGAZINE

>PRINCETON: LEWIS CENTRE FOR THE ARTS

>SMITHSONIAN AFRICAN AMERICAN FILM FEST

>BELO HORIZONTE 

2021-2023

Želimir Žilnik (Serbia) rose to prominence in the late 1960s as a primary figure of the Yugoslav Black Wave. He is noted for his radical, independent approach to filmmaking, his pioneering use of hybrid nonfiction forms, and his inventive approach to docudrama. Having lost both of his parents to Nazi persecutions during World War II, he later trained as a lawyer at the University of Novi Sad, and was assistant to Dušan Makavejev. The student demonstrations of 1968 and the turmoil that followed the occupation of Czechoslovakia are at the centre of Žilnik’s first feature, Early Works (1969), which was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival that same year. Since his beginnings in the lively amateur film scene of Yugoslavia in the 1960s, Žilnik has made more than fifty films, many of which have anticipated real-world events: the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the economic transition from socialism to a neoliberal order, the annihilation of workers’ rights, and wider social erosion related to labor and migration. Facing censorship, Žilnik left Yugoslavia for Germany in the mid-1970s, returning by the end of the decade to go on to a successful career in film and television. More recently, he has been celebrated with major career retrospectives all over the world, and is recognized as one of the most important politically engaged filmmakers working in Europe today. His films have been screened at the Venice Biennale, Documenta (Kassel), MUMOK (Vienna), Sharjah Biennial, Media City Film Festival, ICA (London), National Gallery of Art (Washington), Slovenian Cinematheque (Ljubljana), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Centre Pompidou (Paris), and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo (Mexico City), and many others. The book Želimir Žilnik: Shadow Citizens, named after a retrospective exhibition held at the Kunsthalle Wien (2020), explores aspects of Žilnik’s extensive oeuvre, and was released by Sternberg Press in 2021. MCFF’s Chrysalis Fellowship is providing support for a forthcoming Zilnik feature created in collaboration with legendary filmmaker Karpo Godina. 

Zilnik’s storied life and filmography is ultimately one not easily defined or summarized, but it is full of determination, energy and appreciation of life. From the very beginning, Zilnik has focused on the relationship between ideology and society, and he came to fashion the clearest mirror of the social system by simply having his protagonists play themselves. —Harvard Film Archive

>ARTIST’S WEBSITE

>KUNSTHALLE WIEN

>JURIJ MEDEN ON ŽELIMIR ŽILNIK (video)

>POMPIDOU INTERVIEW WITH ŽELIMIR ŽILNIK (video)

>PURCHASE SHADOW CITIZEN (book)

2019-2020

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Oregon and California. In Portland, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture, and the play between the known and the unknowable. He received his BA from Portland State University and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His work has been exhibited around the world, including at ImagineNATIVE, Sundance, TIFF, NYFF, the Whitney Biennial (2017), and four previous editions of Media City Film Festival. His film Jáaji Approx. was awarded MCFF’s Third Prize (2014). He is the recipient of the More with Less Award from the Images Festival (2016), the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival (2016), the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, and the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship (2018). He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2018-2019), and Sundance (2019). He currently teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Colombia.

The searching, striking digital films of Sky Hopinka are complex formal arrangements, conceptually and aesthetically dense, characterized by an intricate layering of word and image. But they are also wellsprings of beauty and mystery, filled with surprising confluences of speech and song, color and motion. A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, Hopinka (three of whose shorts are featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, opening this month in New York) has described his work as “ethnopoetic,” a term that encompasses several imperatives—among them, the mission to reclaim the ethnographic gaze that has dominated the representation of indigenous cultures and to bring the indirection of poetry to an exploration of Native identity both past and present.– Dennis Lim, Artforum (March 2017)

Artist Links

> MOMA

> ART & EDUCATION

> VISIONS OF AN ISLAND

> DISLOCATION BLUES

> FILMMAKER MAGAZINE

2019-2021

Parastoo Anoushahpour (Iran / Canada) is an artist originally from Tehran now based in Toronto working predominantly with video and installation. She holds a BA in Design for Performance, University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design; a Postgraduate Diploma from the Architectural Association School of Architecture (UK), and a Master of Fine Arts, Interdisciplinary Art, Media & Design from the Ontario College of Art & Design (Toronto). She was an artist in residence at the Mohammad and Mahera Abu Ghazaleh Foundation (Jordan), Tabakalera International Centre for Contemporary Art (Spain), Taipei Artist Village (Taiwan), ZK/U Center for Art and Urbanistics (Germany), and Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Canada). Her recent solo and collaborative work has been shown at Punto de Vista Film Festival, Sharjah Film Platform, Viennale, NYFF, TIFF, Images Festival, IFF Rotterdam, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Experimenta (Bangalore), and Media City Film Festival (2015-2018). Since 2013 she has been working in collaboration with Ryan Ferko and Faraz Anoushahpour. Their shared practice explores the tension of multiple subjectivities as a strategy to address the power inherent in narrative structures. She is a 2019 Chalmers Arts Fellow.

Draped in her skin of changing colors, the amorous lady has closed her eyes, draped in her skin, she has closed her eyes, heavy lids of a seductress she has, heavy eyelids . . . unlike fish with the permanent surprise of their always-round eyes, the gaze within is always alert. Better still! She sees far, aims well. Whips lash out, as if flung by the most deft, most dexterous cowboy . . . How can anything escape this repeated embrace? She can crack open the hardest shells, while the mechanics of her breathing continue undisturbed. She will turn red, black, purple, or yellow. She remembers things…recognize things… She is offended by foul-smelling eggs and will throw them back at you violently, turning white with anger. –Jean Painlevé

Artist Links

>پرستو

>8eleven

>PERSONAL WEBSITE

>MIKE HOOLBOOM: INTERVIEW

(2021-2023)

Fern Silva (USA) is a Portuguese-American filmmaker who studied film at the Massachusetts College of Art and Bard College. He began working as an editor and camera operator in NYC in the early 2000s. Silva’s early films revolved around his relationship to Portugal and have since expanded, underlining the influence of industry on culture and the environment. For over a decade his work has screened widely in festivals, museums, and cinematheques internationally, including at five editions of Media City Film Festival; the Toronto, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, New York, London, Melbourne, and Hong Kong International Film Festivals; MOMA PS1; New Museum; Anthology Film Archive; Harvard Film Archive; and the Gene Siskel Film Center. He is the recipient of an Ann Arbor Film Festival Gus Van Sant Award, the Grand Prix from 25FPS Festival (Zagreb), and most recently the Agora Post-Production Award from the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. Silva’s work has been featured in publications including Cinema Scope, Filmmaker, and Film Comment. He’s taught filmmaking at various institutions including the University of Illinois at Chicago, Bard, and Bennington College, and has received support from the Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, MacDowell, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He was an MCFF Mobile Frames Filmmaker in Residence to complete Wayward Fronds (2015). Rock Bottom Riser, his first feature, had its world premiere at the Berlinale (2021) and received a jury citation. Concurrent with his Chrysalis Fellowship, Silva is a fellow at the Film Study Center at Harvard University. He lives and works in Athens, Greece. 

Rooted in histories of experimental film and ethnography, Fern Silva’s works are sensuous, polyvocal montages of people and places, the natural and unnatural worlds. Silva uses his own field recordings, clips from widely viewed films, and footage from obscure or pedestrian broadcast sources to upend the progressive linearity of conventional storytelling in a move toward narrative disorder; he does this by surfacing various historical moments within more contemporary ones and venturing into narratives of darkness, destruction, and the paranormal. Some of Silva’s films render specific geographical locations as speculative realities, blending fictitious and real aspects of their social and cultural histories, while others are atmospheric and surreal, foregrounding the playfulness and rigor of Silva’s associative strategies. —Alicia Ritson

>HARVARD RADCLIFFE INSTITUTE

>CINEMA DU RÉEL

>DISTRIBUTION AT LIGHT CONE (Paris)

2019-2022

Ben Rivers (UK) studied at Falmouth School of Art. He’s made 30+ films since 2003, ranging in theme from explorations of unknown wilderness territories to candid and intimate portraits of real-life subjects. His film and digital artworks have been exhibited at nearly every major venue dedicated to moving image art worldwide, including CPH:DOX, Havard Film Archive, Indielisboa, IFF Rotterdam, Clermont-Ferrand, Courtisane, Image Forum, Viennale, MoMA, Sarajevo Film Festival, TIFF, 25FPS and seven previous editions of Media City Film Festival since 2008. He won the Fipresci international critics prize at the 68th Venice film festival and the Baloise Art Prize, Art Basel 42 (2011), Robert Gardner Film Award (2012), IFFR Tiger Award for Short Film (2011 & 2014), EYE Art Film Prize (2016), was shortlisted for the Jarman Award (2010 & 2012), and numerous other prizes internationally, including an Honourable Mention at MCFF 2009. His most recent feature Krabi, 2562, co-directed with Anocha Suwichakornpong had its world premiere at Locarno Film Festival (2019). Amongst other programming activities, River’s is co-founder of The Machine that Kills Bad People, a bi-monthly film club at ICA organized with Maria Palacios Cruz, Beatrice Gibson, and Erika Balsom.

Artist Links

>EYE ART & FILM PRIZE: INTERVIEW

>THE SKY TREMBLES AND THE EARTH IS AFRAID AND THE TWO EYES ARE NOT BROTHERS 

>WAYS OF WORLDMAKING (Renee Gladman, Ed Halter, Bettina Steinbrügge, et al)

>KATE MACGARRY

2019-2022

Nazlı Dinçel (Turkey / USA) is a first-generation immigrant born in Ankara, Turkey. They studied at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Dinçel’s films have screened at museums, festivals, and micro-cinemas around the world, including the MoMA and MoMI (NY), IFF Rotterdam, MuMok (Vienna), BAFICI (Buenos Aires), Hong Kong IFF, etc. Their hand-made work reflects on experiences of disruption, recording the body in context with arousal, immigration, dislocation, and desire with the film object: its texture, color and the tractable emulsion of the 16mm material. Their use of text as image, language, and sound imitates the failure of memory and their own displacement within a western society. Dinçel is the recipient of The Helen Hill Award from the Orphan Film Symposium, Ann Arbor Film Festival’s Eileen Maitland Award, a Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship (2018), and a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University (2019). They live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Dinçel began transitioning from female to they/them in early 2022. All genders in previous works and writings will stay as they were created and should be understood accordingly.

Dinçel’s films are rooted in the body, charting her and her lovers’ flesh across experiences of desire and dislocation. Hand-making her films—scratching, sewing, hammering, letter-punching, and typewriting all figure into the process—allows the artist to manifest intensely private subject matter in an equally physical cinematic object. Moments of carnal sublimation or self-pleasure, breakdowns of communication, and the lyrical textures of bodies in the spaces they inhabit all contribute to Dinçel’s self-described “female polemic against representations of the body.” Her work also gestures toward her upbringing in Turkey, from which she emigrated on her own as a teenager; the films’ painstaking construction evokes traditions such as rug-making, while their themes signal an urgency of self-expression without shame or reductive notions of gender. Reminiscent of Carolee Schneemann and Kathy Acker but articulated through a contemporary critical voice that is uniquely her own, Dinçel’s films are knowing, vital anthems about empowerment through art. – MoMA

Artist Links

>MUMOK

>RADCLIFFE INSTITUTE

>VERTICAL FEATURES

2019-2022

Chris Kennedy (Canada) is an independent filmmaker, film programmer, and writer based in Toronto. He received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and is currently Executive Director of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. He programmed for the Images Festival (2003-06), Pleasure Dome (2000-06), and TIFF Cinematheque’s The Free Screen/Wavelengths (2012-2019). He co-founded and co-programmed Early Monthly Segments (2009 to 2018). His films have screened at 100+ film festivals worldwide and have been featured in solo shows at the Canadian Film Institute, Los Angeles Film Forum, Nam June Paik Art Center, La Plata Semana del Film Experimental and the Pacific Film Archive. He has also written extensively about film and music, including features on Akio Suzuki, Olivia Block, Metamkine, Ute Aurand, John Smith, and others. His film “Watching the Detectives” won the Ken Burns Award for the Best of the Festival at the Ann Arbor Film Festival (2018). His work as an artist and programmer operates in dialogue with the history of film as art, exploring the medium’s materiality in a contemporary context.

Often combining a careful concern with the apparatus and a high degree of formal rigour with thoughtful attention to social reality and history, Kennedy’s films examine the interpenetration of a kind of phenomenology – how the things of the world appear to consciousness – with the material possibilities of film (multiple exposures, hand processing, found footage, multi-frame presentations). – Scott Birdwise

Artist Links

>ARTFORUM

>BROOKLYN RAIL

>MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE

>THE WORLD VIEWED (ARTIST’S WEBSITE)

2019-2021

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (Mexico) was formed in order to provide a radical, avant-garde alternative to the commercial and corporate mode of filmmaking in Mexico and internationally. They have created 300+ films since 2012. Their film and digital artworks have been exhibited at Arnolfini Gallery, International Film Festival Oberhausen, Flaherty Film Seminar, VDrome, Crossroads, Filmadrid, Ambulante Cine Documental (Mexico City), Media City Film Festival and the 2019 Whitney Biennial. They were awarded the Images Festival’s Marian McMahon Award and Third Prize at MCFF (2018).  Their recent collection of poetry SOLARIS was published by Evidence at the Centre for Expanded Poetics (Montréal).

“Coyolxauhqui” is a searing evocation of femicide in rural Mexico. It recasts the dismemberment of the Aztec moon goddess Coyolxauhqui by her brother Huitzilopochtli, sun, human sacrifice and war god. A visual poem about the cyclical nature of traditional myths and rituals, Coyolxauhqui is part of a trilogy that proposes itself as an act of political resistance, exploring the connection of current Mexican femicides to larger cultural formations.– Almudena Escobar López

Artist Links

>WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

>HYPERALLERGIC

>VDROME

>MUESTRA INTERNACIONAL DOCUMENTAL DE BOGOTA

2020-2021

Lindsay McIntyre (Canada) is a film artist of Inuk and Scottish settler descent working primarily with analogue film. Her process-based works encapsulate themes of portraiture, place, form, and personal histories linking to Canada’s North. Her current research involves the autoethnographic exploration of intergenerational trauma, as well as a SSHRC funded research and creation project linking land use, art practices, cultural knowledge, and resource extraction in the circumpolar north. She holds an MFA in Film Production from Concordia in Montreal and a BFA with Distinction from the University of Alberta. She was a member of The Double Negative Collective and the recipient of the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for Excellence in Media Arts for 2013 and the Hnatyshyn REVEAL Indigenous Arts Award. Her personal documentary Her Silent Life (2012) won Best Experimental Film at imagineNATIVE in 2012. Her award-winning short documentaries, experimental films, and expanded cinema performances have been seen around the world including at Ann Arbor, Anthology Film Archives, Pleasure Dome, Mono No Aware, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Analogica, WNDX, imagineNATIVE, Images, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Raindance, One Flaming Arrow, and Black Maria, and can be found in several permanent collections. She is a member of the EMO Collective and is an Assistant Professor of Film + Screen Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design on unceded Coast Salish territories.

McIntyre’s work asks for your time. If you’ve seen her films, even just the once, they stay with you, prodding and nudging you to think about them, to sit with them. —Taqralik Partridge

>ARTIST’S WEBSITE

>INUIT ART QUARTERLY (Journal)

>DISTRIBUTION AT CANADIAN FILMMAKERS DISTRIBUTION CENTRE

2019-2021

Faraz Anoushahpour (Iran/Canada) is an artist, filmmaker, and programmer originally from Tehran and currently based in Toronto. He holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the Architectural Association (London, UK), and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from OCAD University (Toronto). He was Programmer at Images Festival (2014-2017), and participant in the Belligerent Eyes residency at the Prada Foundation (Venice, Italy), among others. His collaborative film and installation work with Parastoo Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko employs various performative structures that operate in relation to specific sites. Their collective projects explore collaboration as a way to upset the authority of a singular narrator or position.  His work has been screened and exhibited at the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Experimenta (Bangalore), ZK/U Centre for Art and Urbanistics (Berlin) Media City Film Festival, Mercer Union and Gallery 44 (Toronto).

To be a thing at all – a rock, a lizard, a human – is to be in a twist. Tongue twisters inclined towards nonsense.
Logic includes nonsense as long as it can tell the truth.
The logic of nonsense.
The needle skipped the groove of the present.
Into this dark forest you have already turned.
I take the present to mean for the last twelve thousand years.–Timothy Morton

Artist Links

> فراز انوشه پور

> TABAKALERA INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

> SHARJAH ART FOUNDATION

2019-2020

Ana Vaz (Brazil) studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Le Fresnoy. She was also a member of the SPEAP (Sciences Po, École des Arts Politiques) conceived and directed by Bruno Latour. Her film and digital artworks have been exhibited at Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, Jeu de Paume, Curtas Vila do Conde, Visions du Réel (Nyon), NYFF, and five previous editions of Media City Film Festival. She is a recipient of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Kazuko Trust Award, Media City Film Festival and Fronteira Festival (Goiânia) Grand Prizes (2015). She is also a founding member of the collective COYOTE with Tristan Bera, Nuno da Luz, Elida Hoëg and Clémence Seurat, a cross-disciplinary group working in the fields of ecology, ethnology and political science. Vaz is a 2020 Sundance Film Institute Nonfiction Grantee.

Brazilian filmmaker Ana Vaz makes films rich in beauty and political attentiveness, engaging with the ghosts of colonialism and modernity that infuse both her country and the rest of the Americas. Her first film Sacris Pulso uses a film version of Clarice Lispector’s vision of Brasília, Brasiliários, as source material to create an inter-temporal family voyage into the Oscar Niemeyer-designed city; the capital is referenced again in The Age of Stone, which travels to western Brazil and places an entropic structure into fraught conversation with Niemeyer’s original designs. In Occidente, Vaz voyages to Portugal to delve into a history of colonialism, but instead sees its struggles being re-performed in everyday interactions; There is Land returns home, exploring the backcountry to investigate the notion of land ownership in a country as vast as Brazil. Finally, America: Bay of Arrows takes us to a site of first contact, where Christopher Columbus was confronted by the indigenous Taíno — a foundational and formative challenge to a nascent colonialism. –TIFF

Artist Links

> A FILM, RECLAIMED (trailer)

> HÁ TERRA! (extract)

> THE VOYAGE OUT RADIO SERIES 2222 ∞ 2022

> NYFF Interview: Ana Vaz

2019-2021

Christopher McNamara (Canada) is an award-winning film and video artist who creates single-channel work, audiovisual installations, and live performances. He is a founding member of Media City Film Festival and former Artistic Director of Artcite Inc. His work has been featured in galleries, museums and festivals including, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Western Front (Vancouver), Kunst Werke (Berlin), Mercer Union (Toronto), Projection Gallery (UK), Ann Arbor Film Festival, Galerie B 312 (Montréal), the Khyber Art Centre (Halifax), Binz 39 (Zürich), and the Sherwell Art Centre (UK). In addition to his film & video practice, McNamara works with three distinct audio art collectives:  Thinkbox, Nospectacle and Noiseborder Ensemble. He has performed at international music festivals including, Mutek (Montréal), Spark (Minneapolis) and Detroit Electronic Music Festival. McNamara is a Lecturer IV in the Department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan. He is the recipient of numerous Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council grants, including a Chalmers Art Fellowship. He lives in Windsor, Ontario and Ann Arbor, Michigan.

“Establishing Shots” is a poetic short that gives a different meaning to the term  – a long shot that defines time and place in a tableau. McNamara tells a different story in each establishing shot using voiceovers in different languages. With beautifully photographed everyday spots, such as a hairdressing salon, a cinema and deserted plots of land.– IFFR

Artist Links

>MUTEK

>ESTABLISHING SHOT

>THERE FOR A WHILE AND THEN GONE

>VTAPE

2021-2022

arc (USA) operates as a collective entity that seeks to work outside of a framework that privileges the solitary authorship of objects as a point of artistic creation and finitude, looking instead to a process of intersubjective communal encounter as a locus from which the work generates. As a conceptual and political praxis, the process of this work carries an implicit critique of individuation which necessitates a de-emphasis on any biographical identities involved. As conductive vessels, a configuration of material elements are used to initiate this process, including (but not limited to): photochemical film, performance, sound & light installation, written language, & time-based sculpture. arc is usually initiated by tooth, an artist living in Oakland who has operated the microcinema/archive black hole cinematheque since 2009. arc’s work has been presented at numerous galleries, museums, and exhibition spaces around the world, including The Lab, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Cinematheque, San Francisco Film Festival, City Limits Gallery, Shapeshifters Gallery, CounterPulse, Artist’s Television Access, The Stud, In Process Projects, SOMArts, Mutek SF, Sutro Baths Cave, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Massart Film Society (Boston), The Nightingale (Chicago), Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago), Dirt Palace (Providence, RI), Spectacle Theater (Brooklyn), Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center (Buffalo), NDSM Treehouse (Amsterdam), All Hallows Church (London), Atelier Äuglein (Berlin), L’Abominable (La Courneuve), Les Innatendus Film Festival (Lyon), La Cueva (Mexico City), among others. 

Guided by intuition and Max Ernst’s theory of collage—which he defines roughly as the coincidental encounter of unrelated realities and the spark of poetry between them—Tooth aims to create a poetic experience he calls “time-based sculpture.” His goal is to counter the stultifying effects of mainstream movies and to blur the line between art and life. — Zoe Brezny, East Bay Express

>STREAM ON SOUNDCLOUD

>SFMOMA FEATURED ORGANIZATION: BLACK HOLE CINEMATHEQUE

>EAST BAY EXPRESS: WHERE FILMS BECOME PERFORMANCE

2019-2021

Ryan Ferko (Canada) is an artist working predominantly in film and video. Across cinema and gallery, his films and installations are concerned with landscapes as unstable sources of narration. Ferko turns to myth, story-telling, amateur ‘experts’, and distorted memories as a way to find narrative’s alternative official histories. His artwork emerges as an extension of his research and critical writing, exploring how history is narrated by the competing forces of urban development and architectural heritage. Recent screenings and exhibitions have been held at Tabakalera Centre for International Culture, Sharjah Art Foundation, TIFF (Wavelengths), NYFF (Projections), 24th Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Viennale, Edinburgh IFF, Punto De Vista International Documentary Festival, Crossroads, and three previous editions of Media City Film Festival. He lives and works in Toronto, Ontario.

Ryan Ferko’s new film is a kind of anti-travelogue of Belgrade. More specifically, it’s about the way that the remnants of the Balkans War can only be seen as absence—empty buildings and offices, spaces where key events happened but there is no evidence to be found. If a work like Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah takes this key historiographic idea and presents it as straightforward tragedy, Ferko displays it not as farce but as a tragicomic aspect of late 20th / early 21st century postmodernity. In one sequence, Ferko erects a “TV monument” to the very problem of monumentality, shooting video of a makeshift curbside shrine, and then projecting it on a large monitor on a pedestal in front of a building, where a classical monument would stand.

Two moments, though, best encapsulate Ferko’s poetic consideration of the crisis of cultural memory. In one scene, we see a mother and child at a memorial marker for those killed in the war. The kid asks why they can’t go see the actual ruins of one of the bombed-out buildings. “It’s not safe,” she tells him. “It could collapse. Just cross yourself and say ‘rest in peace,'” and he dutifully complies. And, in an earlier discussion, a young man explains how, during the war, cigarettes were very hard to come by, but weed and LSD were plentiful. So, during a particular deadly raid, he happened to be tripping his ass off. The sound of bombs, the lights, and vibrations all felt to him like a “strange vision of seeing things.” But Ferko seems to suggest that in both cases, there is a misconception that is dictated by the desire to see Serbia as something very different than what it actually is. –Michael Sicinski, MUBI

Artist Links

>CANADIAN ART

>HRVOJI LOOK AT YOU FROM THE TOWER (trailer)