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Media City Film Festival 27th Edition
Spotlight Series

December 2024

Three Fold presents a preview of moving image artwork by Richard Serra, Ja’Tovia Gary, Narcisa Hirsch, Jocelyne Saab, Mona Hatoum, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Nour Ouayda, and Christopher Harris, selected for Spotlight Series, part of Media City Film Festival’s 27th virtual edition streaming online December 9 through December 30, 2024. Three Fold will make links to all films available beginning December 9.

The Spotlight Series provides access to moving image artwork that deserves further critical attention and a wider global audience. It builds on Media City Film Festival’s Retrospective Section, which has presented hundreds of artists over the years, such as Yoko Ono, Michael Snow, Alvin Lucier, and others. This year’s spotlights are curated by MCFF artistic director Oona Mosna.

In its entirety, Media City Film Festival will be streaming more than 70 films and digital artworks, including nearly 50 virtual world premieres, screening over the course of this three-week long celebration. Additional films by Artavazd Péléchian,  Kamal Aljafari,  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.

Here are eight highlights from artists in the Spotlight Series, whose films will be available to stream for free online.


Richard Serra (USA) was a sculptor, filmmaker, and multi-disciplinary artist born in 1938 in San Francisco. He is best known for his monumental steel arcs, spirals, and ellipses that engage the viewer in an altered experience of space. His works are installed at dozens of sites around the world ... [read more + link to films]

Portrait courtesy © Jason Andrew/Getty Images.

Ja’Tovia Gary

Ja’Tovia Gary (USA) is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation born in Dallas, Texas, in 1984. Gary’s multivalent works seek to trouble notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity ... [read more + link to films]

Portrait courtesy © JerSean Golatt.

Jocelyne Saab

Jocelyne Saab (Lebanon/France) was an trailblazing artist, photographer, filmmaker, producer, and journalist born in Beirut in 1948. She is considered a pioneer of Lebanese cinema ... [read more + link to films]

All artworks and stills courtesy of Association Jocelyne Saab © the estate of Jocelyne Saab.

Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum is a Palestinian artist born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1952, who has been living and working in Britain since 1975. Her poetic and political oeuvre is realized in a diverse and often unconventional range of media ... [read more + link to films]

All artworks and stills courtesy of VTape and the artist © Mona Hatoum.

Narcisa Hirsch

Narcisa Hirsch (Argentina) was a pioneering multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker born in Berlin, Germany, in 1928. She relocated to Buenos Aires with her family in the 1930s. Across the last seven decades—a period marked by two military dictatorships in Argentina—Hirsch completed more than 60 films  ... [read more + link to films]

Portrait courtesy of Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch © estate of Narcisa Hirsch.

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich (USA) is a filmmaker and artist born in New York City whose films, concerned with the inner worlds of Black women, are rooted in archival and field research, using abstraction as a mode of resistance ... [read more + link to films]

Portrait courtesy © Michaela Blanc.

Nour Ouayda

Nour Ouayda (Canada/Lebanon) is a filmmaker and film programmer born in Montréal, Canada, in 1991. Her work explores the multiple relationships between image, text, voice, and sound, through filmmaking, film programming, and writing ... [read more + link to films]

Portrait courtesy of the artist © Nour Ouayda.


Portrait courtesy of the artist © Christopher Harris.

Lead image, The Giverny Document, Ja’Tovia Gary, USA, S16mm > digital, 41 min, 2019,  courtesy of the artist © Ja’Tovia Gary.



Founded in 2020, Three Fold is an independent quarterly based in Detroit that presents exploratory points of view on arts, culture, and society in addition to original works in various media, including visual art, literature, film and the performing arts. We solicit and commission contributions from artists, writers, and activists around the world. Three Fold is a publication of Trinosophes Projects, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization located in the historic Eastern Market neighborhood in downtown Detroit. Click here to check out Three Fold’s events page and view a schedule of the publication’s on-site activities.

Three Fold recognizes, supports, and advocates for the sovereignty of Michigan’s twelve federally-recognized Indian nations, for historic Indigenous communities in Michigan, for Indigenous individuals and communities who live here now, and for those who were forcibly removed from their Homelands. We operate on occupied territories called Waawiiyaataanong, named by the Anishinaabeg and including the Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa (Ottawa), and Bodewatomi (Potawatomi) peoples. We hold to commit to Indigenous communities in Waawiiyaataanong, their elders, both past and present, and future generations.