Media City 2024

Programmers note that Artavazd Pelechian’s We (1969) “sets the tone” for MCFF’s twenty-seventh edition. Now eighty-six, the Armenian filmmaker has made just thirteen films over the past sixty years. “Defined variously as a documentarian, a poetic film-essayist, a quasi-experimental artist and a montage neo-theorist, Pelechian’s global esteem, for a certain geek margin of cinephiles, may be the most outsized relative to output since Jean Vigo,” wrote Michael Atkinson for Sight and Sound in 2020. “Everywhere you go to read about him, you find Sergei Parajanov referring to him as ‘one of the few authentic geniuses in the world of cinema.’” Writing for Senses of Cinema in 2017, Paul Macovaz noted that the “perennial themes of nation, that is of collective birth, memory, and culture, are what underpin Pelechian’s formal experiments in We.”

In honor of the late Lebanese journalist and filmmaker Jocelyne Saab, MCFF will present new restorations of her 16 mm films Le bateau de l’exil‭ (1982), Beyrouth jamais plus (1976), and‬ ‭Pour quelques vies (1976)‬. Saab “placed her entire artistic career at the service of the disadvantaged—from displaced peoples to exiled fighters, cities at war, and a Fourth World without a voice,” writes Nicole Brenez. “Her oeuvre draws on the violence of history and an awareness of the actions and images necessary to document, reflect upon, and counter this violence.”

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, who jointly won the Turner Prize in 2019 with Tai Shani, Oscar Murillo, and Helen Cammock, addresses the twenty-first-century tensions and conflicts in Lebanon in The Diary of a Sky (2024). When it screened at the Viennale in October, Jesse Cumming wrote that “Hamdan’s essay film marries text, narration, and a refined soundscape to an assembly of smartphone footage of jets, drones, helicopters, and other invasive objects. Often pixelated and raw, these clips shot by the artist’s broader local network double as a gesture in community, reinforcing the shared situation of the country’s residents.”

This year’s program includes work by Harun Farocki, Deborah Stratman, Ja’Tovia Gary, Kevin Jerome Everson, Sharon Lockhart, Beatrice Gibson, Sky Hopinka, Pat O’Neill, Skip Norman, Ben Rivers and Céline Condorelli, Rose Lowder, Ana Vaz, Simon Liu, and dozens more. One could easily spend the rest of the month just taking it all in.