Introduced and followed by an in-person Q&A with Media City Film Festival Assistant Director Jeremy Rigsby
Curated by Media City Film Festival’s Artistic Director Oona Mosna, ‘Our Tongues in Exile’ gathers films by artists and directors working across continents, generations, and cinematic languages who—along with hundreds of other international co-conspirators—have played formative roles in the development of the festival’s storied history across the last 20 years. These artists have created groundbreaking new works of cinematic art as fellowship and residency recipients, and have participated as spotlight, retrospective, or award-winning artists. Echoing across personal, political, and geographic landscapes, these films disrupt the linear temporality of narrative to speak to the urgency of displacement, the resilience of cultural memory, and the radical potential of solidarity through shared gesture, resistance, cinematic invention, and the personal and collective ritual.
In Manzanas (1969), Narcisa Hirsch—whose pioneering feminist and expanded cinema practices helped shape Argentina’s underground film movement—documents the enduring quality of care in a fleeting, collective act of generosity, performed on the streets of Buenos Aires under the shadow of military dictatorship. Mati Diop’s Atlantiques (2009), which had its North American premiere at MCFF in 2010, captures a nocturnal conversation on the shores of Dakar, haunted by the memory and perils of “illegal” migration, a decade ahead of Diop’s Grand Prix win at Cannes. MCFF Spotlight artist, Ja’Tovia Gary’s influential short film An Ecstatic Experience (2013) reanimates archival footage into a fierce meditation on historical intervention and Black transcendence.
Also featured is Pablo Mazzolo’s The Newest Olds (2023), a visual and sonic destabilization of Windsor-Detroit’s urban and natural environment, collapsing the physical, political, and sensory boundaries between Canada and the United States. Speaking in Tongues: Take One (2024) by African American filmmaker and MCFF Chrysalis Fellow Christopher Harris, channels the improvisatory energy of free jazz and Black resistance. Inspired by Ishmael Reed’s seminal novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and various other sources, the film reorients aspects of cinematic history in an effort to deconstruct foundations upon which white, western “civilization” rests. In Electrical Gaza (2015), Rosalind Nashashibi blends animation and documentary to reflect the suspended reality of Gaza under siege. Closing the program, Malena Szlam’s Lunar Almanac (2013) compresses thousands of lunar observations into a stroboscopic reverie of cyclic transformation, signalling to enduring forces that remain within our sights despite the impossibility of the shared historical moment.
Each film in Our Tongues in Exile is at once rooted and unmoored, echoing Media City Film Festival’s method of decentralized co-operation and its long-standing commitment to cinematic experimentation and international solidarity.
FILM INFO:
Manzanas, Narcisa Hirsch, Argentina, 4.5 min, 1969
Atlantiques, Mati Diop, Senegal/France, 16 min, 2009
An Ecstatic Experience, Ja’Tovia Gary, USA, 6 min, 2015
The Newest Olds, Pablo Mazzolo, Argentina, 15 min, 2023
Speaking in Tongues: Take One, Christopher Harris, USA, 15 min, 2024
Electrical Gaza, Rosalind Nashashibi, Palestine/UK, 18 min, 2015
Lunar Almanac, Malena Szlam, Canada/Chile, 3 min, 2013
Total running time: 78 minutes
SYNOPSES:
Manzanas, Narcisa Hirsch, Argentina, 4.5 min, 1969
Hirsch’s early entry point into filmmaking consisted of documentations of her performances, happenings, and collective actions in public spaces. In Manzanas, the artist and her collaborators Marie Louise Alemann and Walther Mejía handed out hundreds of apples to people walking past the corner of Florida and Diagonal Norte in Buenos Aires. “This is not your everyday apple. We are doing our work with the people. The work is the shared moment.”
Atlantiques, Mati Diop, Senegal/France, 16 min, 2009
Three young Senegalese men sit around a bonfire in Dakar at night, one describing his experience of trying to cross the ocean to Spain. As they reflect on his dangerous journey, light plays across their faces, and everything hangs in suspension. Past lives and future dreams pale against the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean. Melancholic and mysterious, the award-winning nonfiction short urgently and elegantly addresses the perils of “illegal” migration. Atlantiques had its North American premiere at Media City Film Festival in 2010, winning one of the festival’s top awards.
An Ecstatic Experience, Ja’Tovia Gary, USA, 6 min, 2015
“An Ecstatic Experience is a meditative invocation on transcendence as a means of restoration. I am simultaneously creating and destroying, remaking and unmaking. My intimate interaction with the archive … expresses my desire to be a part of it, to make my presence felt in and on that history while also interrogating it.”—Ja’Tovia Gary
The Newest Olds, Pablo Mazzolo, Argentina, 15 min, 2023
The Newest Olds is the second installment in Argentinian filmmaker Pablo Mazzolo’s cinematic diptych exploring the natural and urban environment within and surrounding the border region of Windsor–Detroit. Completed seven years after the release of Fish Point (2015), Mazzolo’s revelatory study of light and landscape that animated the deciduous forest harbours and rare ecosystem at the southeastern tip of Pelee Island, The Newest Olds transforms Detroit’s iconic cityscapes, dislodging buildings from their foundations and collapsing the physical, political, and sensory boundaries between Canada and the United States through alchemical in-camera and optical printing techniques.
Speaking in Tongues: Take One, Christopher Harris, USA, 15 min, 2024
For years, Harris has been developing a 16mm film inspired by Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo. In his Speaking in Tongues: Take One, Harris expands on Reed’s plot using found footage from Hollywood films, cartoons and documentaries. Mumbo Jumbo tells a story of resistance against the suppression of Black dance culture. Referred to as a “virus”, the book introduces the character of Jes Grew, a personification of ragtime, jazz, polytheism, and freedom. In Speaking in Tongues: Take One, Harris borrows from the tradition of free jazz and avant-garde musical forms and suggests that other ‘takes’, or interpretations, could emerge in years to come. The film, which cites Reed, addresses the American carceral system, and Black resistance through states of ecstasy. –Tate Modern
Electrical Gaza, Rosalind Nashashibi, Palestine/UK, 18 min, 2015
In Electrical Gaza Rosalind Nashashibi combines her footage of Gaza—and the fixer, drivers and translator who were her constant company—with animated scenes. She presents Gaza as under a spell; isolated, suspended in time, difficult to access and highly charged. She shows us Gaza as she experienced it in the quiet pause before the onslaught of Israeli bombardment in the summer of 2014.
Lunar Almanac, Malena Szlam, Canada/Chile, 3 min, 2013
Lunar Almanac traces the observational points of the lunar cycle in a series of visual notations. Using single-frame and long-exposure photography, the unaltered, in-camera editing accumulates over 4000 layered field views of half-moons, new moons, and full moons. These lunar inscriptions flit across the screen with a frenetic energy, illuminating nocturnal reveries that pull at the tides as much as our dreams.
OONA MOSNA, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, MEDIA CITY FILM FESTIVAL
Oona Mosna (Canada) is an artist, author, curator and artistic director of Media City Film Festival since 2004. She has organized thousands of screenings, retrospectives, and exhibitions with artists including Yoko Ono, Mati Diop, Michael Snow, Barbara Hammer, Sergei Parajanov, Carolee Schneemann, VALIE EXPORT, Kevin Jerome Everson at the Presidential Palace and National Museum of Fine Arts (Chile), Toronto International Film Festival, Detroit Institute of Arts, Walker Art Center, Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, and countless other festivals, museums and grass-roots venues worldwide. As an accomplished producer, she has commissioned dozens of films that have screened at the Academy Museum of Motion Picture Arts, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Venice Film Festival, the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, New York Film Festival, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and her living room, kitchen and backyard. She lives and works in Windsor-Detroit and internationally.
Water
binds me
to your name …
Nothing takes me from the butterflies of my dreams
to my reality: not dust and not fire. What
will I do without roses from Samarkand? What
will I do in a theater that burnishes the singers with its lunar
stones? Our weight has become light like our houses
in the faraway winds. We have become two friends of the strange
creatures in the clouds … and we are now loosened
from the gravity of identity’s land. What will we do … what
will we do without exile, and a long night
that stares at the water?
– Who Am I, Without Exile? Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Fady Joudah
