A lyrical tour guide takes the viewer on a trip down the Wakulla River in North Florida. Although the camera remains relentlessly fixed on the protagonist, his vivid, near-musical descriptions of Southern flora, fauna, and wildlife gives a better view of things than total visual mobility could ever allow.

Alligator on your left.

Tyler Turkle (Alliance OH, 1947). Studies at Mount Union College and Kent State. 15+ films since 1973; screenings and exhibitions at mumok (Vienna), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Groninger Museum (Groningen), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Cornell University, and New Museum (New York). First appearance at Media City. Lives in Sonoma County, California.

Framed within the vision of the Hudson River School and the legend of Rip Van Winkle, Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder unfolds as a storm approaches on the horizon. An uncertain future is in store as the creeping hand of history disrupts nature and civility in the Hudson River regions of upstate New York.

Fern Silva (Hartford CT, 1982). Studies at the Massachusetts College of Art and Bard College. 10+ films since 2007; screenings and exhibitions at Cinema du Réel (Paris), IFF Rotterdam, Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), New Museum (New York), etc. Sixth appearance at Media City. 2014 Mobile Frames Filmmaker in Residence. Radcliffe Film Studies Fellow at Harvard University (2018-2019). Lives in New York, NY.

Prefaces is composed of wild sounds constructed along entropic lines, placed tensely beside bebop rhythms, and a resurfacing narrative cut from a dialogue with 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.

It was Arthur Jafa who taught me how to make video look like film. I told my students video could do this. But I lied. Recently shooting film I realized how wrong I was. As of now, film remains, what AJ calls, the gold standard of image-making—what “is considered definitive.”

A nineteenth century relic then, or is film the definitive icon…?

Abigail Child (Newark NJ, 1948). Studies at Radcliffe College, Harvard University, and Yale University School of Art. 40+ films since 1970; screenings at all major venues for artists’ film worldwide; in permanent collections of MoMA (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), etc. Fulbright (1993) and Guggenheim (1996) Fellowships; Rome Prize (2010). Six volumes of poetry since 1983. Sixth appearance at Media City, including retrospective screening (2004). Lives in New York, NY.

“Sketches and Portraits for Jean-Michel was photographed on the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan, two areas familiar to Basquiat, and visually explores many of the themes and influences found in his paintings: street life, street art, politics, jazz, bodies in motion, bodies at rest, life, death, and black resilience.” – The Barbican

Ephraim Asili (Philadelphia PA, 1979). Studies at Temple University and Bard College. 10+ films since 2007; screenings and exhibitions at TIFF, MoMA (New York), Milan Film Festival, “Projections” at NYFF, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Whitney Museum (New York), etc. Third appearance at Media City. Mobile Frames Filmmaker in Residence (2016). Media City Grand Prize Winner (2017). Lives in Hudson, New York.

“The film is a testimony where the discreet affirmation of revolt can be heard: ‘neither torturer, nor victim.’ Jeny (who refers to himself in the masculine gender) recounts his delinquency as being the just return for the social violence committed against him. The building, disused at the time of the shooting, is not only interesting for its Bauhaus style copied by German architects in 1964, but also because it has been the centre of many student uprisings. During the generation of the filmmaker’s father, it was a hotspot of the activism repressed in bloodshed across all of South America. On one side, a survivor (heroin used as an escape to elsewhere), who turned his tattooed body into a work of art, and on the other, the political slogans “tattooed” on the brick walls – open-air history books that were demolished in 2015.” – Charlotte Garson

Laura Huertas Millán (Bogotá, Colombia 1983). Studies at Le Fresnoy, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Harvard University. 10+ films since 2008. Screenings and exhibitions at Guggenheim (New York), ICA (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museo de Arte de Medellín, NYFF, etc. Prix Pardi di domani, Locarno Festival (2018). First appearance at Media City. Lives in Paris, France.

In 1973, the Shah of Iran commissioned the construction of a paper factory in the lush northern province of Gilan. Foreign engineers from Canada and the United States were brought to develop and run the facility, bringing with them their families as well as a species of pine tree previously unknown to the region. Their stay, however, came to a sudden halt in 1979 with the Iranian revolution forcing them to flee the site overnight. Chooka unfolds between the site of this factory and a rural family house located in a nearby village. Coinciding with the construction of the factory, this family hosted the production of Bahram Beyzaie’s film, The Stranger and The Fog. Shot in the same village, the film begins when an unconscious stranger drifts ashore in a small boat. After the revolution, Beyzaie returned to the same house to produce his film Bashu, the Little Stranger about a young war refugee who escapes the south and ends up alone in a small northern village.

Parastoo Anoushahpour (Tehran, Iran 1986), Faraz Anoushahpour (Tehran, Iran 1987), Ryan Ferko (Mississauga ON, 1987). Work in collaboration since 2013. Screenings at NYFF, IFF Rotterdam and TIFF. Second appearance at Media City. All live in Toronto.

“Healthy People for Fun represents Godina’s mature experimental style, characterized by carefully composed, colourful, and almost totally still shots, heavy focus on soundtrack music, and countercultural or obliquely provocative content that in a deadpan way defied official representations of Yugoslav life. In the wake of a reactionary backlash in Yugoslav political life in the early 1970s, Godina’s career as an experimental director was stymied—his last experimental short from that era, On the Art of Loving or Film with 14441 Frames (1972), was chopped up with an ax by representatives of the Yugoslav army, which had commissioned the film. According to Godina, he was able to save only one print.”— Ksenya Gurshtein

Karpo Godina (Skopje, Macedonia 1943). Studies at Ljubljana Academy for Theatre, Radio, Film and Television. 25+ films since 1962; screenings and exhibitions at Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), IFF Rotterdam, and career retrospective at MoMA as part of “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980” (2018). Collaborator of Želimir Žilnik. Winner of Golden Bear at Berlinale (1969), Prešern Lifetime Achievement Award – highest state award for arts in Slovenia (2006). First appearance at Media City.