By Tara Judah
With adrenaline and urgency Kriv Stenders’ Australia Day hit the cinema screen. No moral compass for another ten or so minutes in. Meanwhile, everyone’s running and the sounds of panicked breath in surround sound suture me into the onscreen efforts for escape.
By José Sarmiento-Hinojosa
This technical feature in black and white, color and sepia transcends the mechanical feats which in themselves are remarkable. The narrative of space-time, allows for a different perception of the experimental narrative, where the displacement of space is fundamental for recreating this “time of concentration” where the shifts and the placement of the image are something that one is completely aware of. In some way, Larose’s work teaches how to watch again.
By Aldo Padilla
“I came to Comala because I was told that my father lived here, someone named Pedro Páramo”. That’s the start of the Juan Rulfo novel, which is a search of a ghostly figure in a town which seems to be a strange representation of limbo. Meanwhile, the questions about the land where the dying live arises, and also the question if the land itself is dying, a land whose blood circulates in form of lava, that from time to time needs to depurate some wounds through volcanos.
By Ivonne Sheen
The Sea: organic millenary presence, reckless, that constantly roars under the Moon’s spell. Place of combats, and great escapes. Sunken Universe which evokes the immensity of its nature. Unavoidable poetic image that transcends the human simplicity. As part of the Media City Film Festivals 2017 ’s International Competition, two films approach the sea from the cinematic experience to evoke new aesthetic relations with it.
By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
Always punk, always noir, F.J. Ossang’s post-apocalypse has no survivors. Everyone’s a victim of other people’s bullets, of their own bullets, of the condemnation of their past. 9 Doigts makes a perfect “black triptych of the apocalypse” with Treasure of the Bitch Islands (1990) and Dharma Guns (2010), both masterpieces of industrial atmospheres, where nuclear waste is a representation of the tragic ambitions of men.
By Morella Moret
Ephrain’s Asili’s Fluid Frontiers brings together elements of his intimate relationship with African American struggle, freedom and resistance to tell us the story of the people of Detroit. Through metaphors, poems and sensations, he exemplifies different moments of the long journey of the city and the African-American struggle that lead us to this day.
By Mónica Delgado
As in Gradual Speed, of of his latest works, the artist and filmmaker Els van Riel explores the diverse mechanisms of light as a physical and optical effect, in its specificity and materiality. In her Fugue, a Light’s Travelogue (Belgium, 2017), presented in Media City Film Festival, she elaborates a proposal of a story of light from its reverse, the phantasmagoric effect of shadows, light games and ghosts that surge from the darkness.
By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
It’s difficult not to feel shaken by the images of red flowers fenced by metal barb wires in Jennifer Saparzadeh’s last film Nu Dem. The transient feel of communities fleeing home through the Balkan Route is an image cinema has not been unaware of, but the nakedness of everyday coexistence, of a mass of humanity trying to reach Western Europe to survive, unaware if freedom or rejection awaits them, it’s specially disturbing in this kind of diary-film.
by José Sarmiento-Hinojosa
Proof of the outstanding reach of the Media City Film Festival in Detroit, is the remarkable variety of styles in contemporary experimental cinema, a feat that is possible via the efforts of an outstanding team, headed by Oona Mosna, which has attempted and achieved a fine selection in this edition of 2017. Following are a group of texts devoted to share a glimpse of what expanded cinema has to offer today in the 22th edition of the MC.
By Ivonne Sheen
In Potamkin, a mass of spectators react and turn their heads from side to side. They appear as a reminder of the past of those images we are watching and of their purpose. Thinking of film as a device of social change, set questions about the rol of the spectators, the filmmakers and the film critics.
Director: Mónica Delgado Ch.
ISSN 2311-7451
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