Media City Film Festival award winner Sky Hopinka is the featured artist on Vdrome January 12-25, 2018. Until January 25, you can watch Sky’s Dislocation Blues which premiered at Media City’s 22nd edition in 2017. Hopinka discusses the film with Tate Modern’s Carly Whitefield. Here is a segment from that interview:

CW: Language has been a prominent consideration in your work over the last few years. In Dislocation Blues, the focus seems to have shifted from language acquisition and preservation to how we process experience and memory through language, and the stakes and pressures on the act of speaking itself. Could you elaborate on this aspect of the film in relation to previous works?

SH: I believe it functions in the same way, where the acquisition and preservation of language is best engaged through its utility rather than as an abstracted idea. How are people speaking in ways that are just as much about resistance as they are acts of asserting their presence? The through-line between previous works and this one is that the focus is on the stories that people tell and on allowing a place for those stories to be told. The voice of the oppressed is always weighted and burdened by the expectations of the oppressor, and I’m always interested in hearing those who wish to speak without regard for those expectations; thoughtfully, deliberately, and without shame.

Access the film and full interview here: http://www.vdrome.org/

Hopinka’s film “Jáaji Approx” which had its World Premiere at Media City was awarded the festival’s Second Prize in 2015. An excerpt from that film here on Sky’s Vimeo page: https://vimeo.com/130405554

Vdrome’s “Holiday Special” was Kevin Jerome Everson’s made in Windsor film “Grand Finale” shot on the banks of the Detroit river in 2015 during his Mobile Frames residency. Everson created more than a handful of films in Windsor-Detroit during his residency, including It Seems to Hang On which premiere at the Venice Film Festival, and was recently exhibited as part of MoCAD’s Sonic Rebellion: Music as Resistance exhibition (September 8, 2017 – January 7, 2018).