27th Media City Film Festival | ACWR Co-Presents the Regional Program

The Arts Council Windsor and Region (ACWR) is honoured to be co-presenting the REGIONAL PROGRAM during the 27th Media City Film Festival along with the College for Creative Studies (Detroit).

The 27th edition takes place virtually this year from December 9th to 30th, 2024 and will include more than 70 films and digital artworks with nearly 50 virtual world premieres. 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.

All screenings are simultaneous, free, and globally accessible for the entire duration of the festival: www.mediacityfilmfestival.com (live December 9)

Enjoy the following 11 films from the comfort of your home: 

Film in which a hand moves almost blindly across a canvas, Nik Liguori, USA, 16mm ,  digital, 2.5 min, 2024

A haiku. A Fluxus-inspired, hand-inked tone poem of motion and form.

Nik Liguori (USA) is a writer, filmmaker, and interdisciplinary artist born in Detroit in 2001. His work in film, collage and multimedia engages the archive as a deeply resourceful space for creativity and play, reimagining fragments of social histories, personal mythologies, and cultural references to melodrama and fantasy. He received his BFA in film from College for Creative Studies (2024). His previous films, such as (injury detail) (2024), moonshine/St. Paul (2023), and Swimmer (2023), have been screened and exhibited at venues including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Millennium Film Workshop, College for Creative Studies, Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, CROSSROADS, and Laterale Film Festival. His artwork has been exhibited at the Scarab Club and Detroit Artists Market and has also appeared in The Horizon Magazine and three volumes of Therapeutic Edgelands, published by A.W.E. Society. He lives and works in Detroit.

Driving Force, Joanie Wind, USA, digital, 17.5 min, 2023

Driving Force journeys through the banality of ecocide, circling metaphorical parallels in the capitalist treatment of nature, workers, and women. Recurring stress dreams about natural disasters and a loss of control conjure up questions about reason, rugged individualism, conquest, and the apocalyptic madness of greed. With equal amounts of sarcasm and unflinching vulnerability, the narrator ponders impending cataclysm and whether to bring children into a world seemingly marked for destruction. Painterly compositions reveal the frenzy of this moment ostensibly at the end of human civilization, using metaphor to examine the forces behind such a culmination. Amid the hopelessness, paranoia, and despair emerges an absurd beauty and sense of hope that submits to whatever comes next.

Joanie Wind (USA) is a filmmaker and painter artist born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1987. She sources nostalgic imagery of Americana—Southwest deserts, Midwest farmlands, meme culture, and smartphone interfaces—and melts them together in a metaphorical performance of conquest, alienation, escapism, consumerism, and existential dread, plummeting viewers into a dystopian space of anxiety and despair. She received an MFA from Eastern Michigan University (2015). Her previous video works, including This One Weird Trick (2020), Girls Grow Up Drawing Horses (2019), and Grate American Cheese Again (2018), have screened at numerous festivals locally and internationally, winning awards from Santiago Indie Film, Video Art Festival Turku, Porto Femme International Film Festival, Chhatrapati Shivaji Film Festival, Mannheim Arts and Film Festival, Worldfest Houston, Tatras International Film Festival, Paradise Film Festival, and Drunken Film Fest, among others. She undertook a residency at Hatch Art Collective in Hamtramck (2017) and worked as education and outreach coordinator for Ann Arbor Film Festival. She lives and works in Detroit, where she is an adjunct professor at College for Creative Studies.

Freshwater, dream hampton, USA, digital, 10 min, 2022

A disappearing Black city, flooded basements, and the fluid nature of memory.

Freshwater is a portrait of remembrance, and of maintaining connection in the wake of ongoing displacement, abandonment, and climate catastrophe. This film was meant to be small in every way—lingering shots that seem like photographs until the wind blows a leaf or a raindrop disturbs a puddle. Similarly the intentionally small production was meant to be healing. It was a retreat into a cadre of a like-minded community of Detroit artists after doing work on three projects that were at major studios. I made Freshwater to remind myself I’m an artist, but also to reinforce the organizing principle about the power of small, local organizing.

dream hampton (USA) is a filmmaker, producer, activist, and writer born in Detroit in 1972. Her collected output of films, essays, and criticism over three decades have sustained a thorough, incisive, and unparalleled engagement with hip-hop music and culture that have made her one of the most influential cultural figures of her generation. After graduating from Cass Tech High School, hampton relocated to New York, where she studied film at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and co-founded the New York chapter of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. Her films, including the Emmy-nominated Surviving R. Kelly series produced for Lifetime TV (2019), It’s A Hard Truth Ain’t It for HBO (2018), and Ladies First: A Story of Women in Hip-Hop for Netflix (2023), have also screened at numerous festivals and venues such as Lincoln Center, Sundance Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, and Museum of the African Diaspora, among many others. She is co-author of Jay-Z’s memoir Decoded (2010) and a frequent contributor to publications including Vibe, Essence, Harper’s Bazaar, The Village Voice, Detroit News, and Spin. She has received a Peabody Award (2019), a Kresge Artist Fellowship (2014), was a Visiting Artist at Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts (2020), was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world (2019), and in 2024 was named a Stuart Regen Visionary by the New Museum for “individuals who have made major contributions to art and culture and who are actively imagining a better future.” She lives and works on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

phantoms, Scott Northrup, USA, Super 8mm , digital, 3.5 min, 2024

A modern materialist film about filmmaking and dying trees, edited in-camera and hand-processed in a beer bath.

This film is available to stream globally.

This film is co-presented with Arts Council Windsor and Region and College for Creative Studies.

Scott Northrup (USA) is an artist, filmmaker, writer, curator, and educator born in Dearborn, Michigan, in 1969. His work across media explores questions of love, lust, loss, and desire, especially the unspoken, unsure, and ephemeral. He received a BFA in Studio Art from the College for Creative Studies (1992) and an MA in Media Studies from The New School (2003). He has completed more than 50 moving image artworks since 1989, which have been exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries including The Museum of Modern Art, Art Basel Miami, White Columns, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Mothlight Microcinema, Printed Matter, Detroit Artists Market, and Media City Film Festival. He has undertaken residencies at the Museum of Loss and Renewal, Arteles Creative Center, and AICAD/New York Studio Residency Program. His own writing, and writing about his practice, has appeared in Hyperallergic, Krass Journal, DittoDitto, New Art Examiner, Detroit Art Review, and elsewhere. He is professor and chair of the Film, Photography, and Interdisciplinary Art + Design programs at College for Creative Studies in Detroit. He lives and works in Dearborn, Detroit, and Hamtramck, Michigan.

evidence, Trinity Sutherland, USA, digital, 4 min, 2023

Serving as a self-portrait, evidence illustrates an authentic insight on navigating mental health. Reciting ineffective personal mantras to missed calls from therapists, this collected “evidence” is a testament that everything is not okay. The film plays between abrupt imagery and measured moments, pushing the chaos mental health can bring.

Trinity Sutherland (USA) is an emerging filmmaker born in Detroit in 2003. Her work employs experimental editing techniques and innovative storytelling, utilizing rapid intercutting, footage manipulation, and abstracted imagery. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at College for Creative Studies in Detroit. Her other films, including Metamorphosis (2023) and Click Me (2024) have screened at venues including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Lift Off Global Network, Made at Home Cinema, and NOVA24 Photo + Film Festival. Her most recent work is the short film Vessel, currently in postproduction. She also works as a freelance video editor for music videos and fashion films for a number of independent filmmakers and companies. She lives and works in Detroit.

The Tiger, Shanna Maurizi, USA, 16mm ,  digital, 19 min, 2024

Spontaneous communication between two people transects geographic and psychological terrain indicating a co-habitation of the mind. Three picnickers reconfigure across time, forms hover at the fringes of consciousness, and bills go unpaid as the story spans remote coastlines and re-forested roadways.

Shanna Maurizi (USA) is an artist, curator, and filmmaker born in California. Her works on paper and in film, video, and sculpture “seek out access points to the unknown.” She received an MFA in Film from California College of the Arts. Her films and visual artworks, including Late Night with Carl Sagan (2013) and Sunken Treasure (2018), have been exhibited at festivals, galleries, and other venues including Experiments in Cinema, LaMaMa Gallery, Visionfest, Other Cinema, Art-Kino Croatia, ART HAUS, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Anthology Film Archives. As a curator she co-founded both the Red Door and The Climax, A Movie House in Oakland, California, and the collective space Songs for Presidents in New York, where she also taught in the film department at New York University. She has undertaken residencies at Stichting Kunst and Complex in Rotterdam and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, Croatia. She now lives and works in Detroit where she leads 16mm workshops for Mothlight Microcinema.

Mourner’s Bench, bree gant, USA, digital, 2 min, 2022

Mourner’s Bench is from the 1947 solo by choreographer Talley Beatty. It refers to a prayer bench in churches where people go to grieve, and the inseparable relationship between hope and grief. Set at a Detroit bus stop, this work considers grief in relation to place and mobility. Conceived, directed, and edited by bree gant, in collaboration with choreographer Celia Benvenutti and cinematographer Devin Drake.

bree gant (USA) is a multidisciplinary artist born in Detroit in 1989. They work across and between disciplines, rooted in a legacy of Black queer feminist performance, employing figure and movement to study relationships between narrative, ritual, and temporality. They received a BA from Howard University (2011). Their work in photography, video, film, dance, installation, and performance—including the films Masquerade (2014), muva / On the River (2015), on vessels (2014), If we’re made of salt and memories, then so is the sea (2018), Core (2019), and on spirit (2020)—have been exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries including BlackStar Film Festival, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, African American Art and Culture Complex, Detroit Historical Museum, and Detroit Science Lab Gallery. They are the recipient of awards, grants, and residencies, including a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Arts Grant (2016), a Detroit Narrative Agency Fellowship (2017), an Art Matters Fellowship (2019), a Kresge Arts Fellowship (2020), a Red Bull Artist Residency (2012), and a Surf Point Foundation Artist Residency (2022). They are a founding member of CeBen Dance Collective (2021). They live and work between Detroit and Chicago, where they are pursuing an MFA at Northwestern University.

Letter from Blackhawk Island, Derek Jenkins, Canada/USA, 16mm ,  digital, 2 min, 2024

From her home in Blackhawk Island, Wisconsin, the poet Lorine Niedecker traded lively and impactful letters with numerous peers, most notably Louis Zukofsky and, later, Cid Corman. After a brief sojourn in New York, she lived alone in a one-room cabin for much of her adult life, often walking several miles into nearby Fort Atkinson to work as a copy editor at a dairy industry newsletter until failing eyesight reduced her to menial labour. Niedecker connected to the outside world by post, and among the small shelf of books she kept for herself in later years were several collections of letters, including those of the composer Franz Liszt and his lover, the scholar Marie Catherine Sophie, Comtesse d’Agoult.

Letter from Blackhawk Island assembles images and sound gathered on the small plot of land by the Rock River where Niedecker lived, along with ambient audio from the only existing recording of the poet’s voice, into the filmmaker’s own condensed record of prismatic correspondences.

Derek Jenkins (Canada/USA) is a motion picture photographer born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1980. His practice is handmade, personal, and documentary, with an interest in labour, ecology, and technology—specifically the reciprocal relationships between tools, materials, and ways of knowing. He received a BA (2003) and an MA (2008) in English from the University of Arkansas, and an MFA in Documentary Media from Ryerson University (2021). His films, including Contents (2018), The Shouting Flower (2019), Livestock (2019), and Grounders (2020), have been exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries worldwide including DocLisboa, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, McMaster Museum of Art, ARKIPEL Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, Antimatter Film Festival, the8fest, FRACTO Experimental Film Encounter, Factory Media Centre, and Experiments in Cinema, among many others. His film As Close as Your Voice Can Call (2023) won the Best Regional prize at the 26th Media City Film Festival. He is Executive Director of Hamilton Artists Inc. and is a board member at Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. Jenkins has also worked as a technician at Niagara Custom Lab. He lives and works in Hamilton, Ontario.

We Are We Come We Go, Ed Janzen, Canada, digital, 1 min, 2023

A meditation on time and acquaintances; a walk through a maze; the artist draws a circular path.

Ed Janzen (Canada) is a multimedia artist originally from Kingsville, Ontario, who has been one of the foundational pillars of artist-run culture in Windsor and Essex county for more than three decades. He received both a BCompSc (1987) and a BFA (2006) from the University of Windsor. His video and intermedia work has been exhibited at film festivals and galleries worldwide, including Media City Film Festival, Deluge Contemporary, Sphere, Kassel Dokfest, Antimatter, Onion City Film Festival, Australian Film Festival, Basement Media Fest, and Nuit Blanche Toronto. His video-based Ambient Walks have taken place in Canada, USA, Cuba, Portugal and Spain. His performance drawings and intermedia installations in collaboration with Collette Broeders (under the name Janzen+Broeders) have been exhibited and performed in Toronto and Windsor. Janzen is a co-founder of Windsor’s Scratch & Sniff Writers and Artists Collective, a former board member of Artcite Inc. (1995–98) and Media City Film Festival (2011–13), and currently serves on the board of Stone & Sky Music & Art Series on Pelee Island. He lives and works in Windsor, Ontario.

Civil War Surveillance Poems (Part 1), Mitch McCabe, USA, digital, 15 min, 2020

The first iteration of a seven-part feature film of speculative experimental nonfiction, contemplating an impending American civil war via lyrical nonfiction, mixing call-in radio, twenty years of verité footage from the filmmaker’s archive, and robots. Begun in 2018, the film is partly a nostalgic political travelogue and partly pre-war surveillance records, deconstructing our past/future/present political moment and building to a clashing ideology.

Mitch McCabe (USA) is an artist, filmmaker, and educator born in Detroit. Their work spans narrative, nonfiction, and experimental film, mining themes of class, politics and identity grounded in their native Midwest. They received a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College and an MFA from New York University. Their short and feature films have screened at numerous venues worldwide, including Sundance Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, Sheffield DocFest, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, International Kurzfilmtage Winterhür, New York Film Festival, and AFI SilverdocsTrue/False Film Festival. They are a 2019 Sarah Jacobson awardee, received Flaherty Film Seminar (2018) and MacDowell (2019) Fellowships, and their work has also been supported by the Djerassii (2004), Jerome (2007), and Princess Grace (2022) Foundations. They live and work between Michigan and Ithaca, New York, where they are an associate professor in the Department of Media Arts, Studies and Sciences at Ithaca College.

If I Was a Poem, Katie Barkel, USA, digital, 3.5 min, 2024

Poet James D. Fuson re-creates the events of the day he was released from prison after serving a sentence of nearly thirty years.

Katie Barkel (USA) is a filmmaker and film editor born in Michigan in 1985. She frequently works in collaborative process with musicians, authors and poets, including Sixto Rodriguez and Tiya Miles. She received a BA in Film and Video Studies from the University of Michigan. Her previous films, including Draggers and Rip Spots (2008), They Cannot Touch Her (2012), and Chris Riddell Eats Pancakes and Bacon (2013), have screened at venues including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Freep Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art, Media City Film Festival, and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. She has also worked as a camera assistant on numerous feature films and commercials and has created music videos for bands including Jamaican Queens, Child Bite, and The Silent Years. She has been a member of the Detroit chapter of Film Fatales since 2014. She lives and works in Detroit, where she teaches at College for Creative Studies.

Media City Film Festival is an international festival of film and digital art dedicated to the creation and exhibition of the cinematic arts in Windsor/Detroit since 1994.