three fold special section—fall 2026
STARSHINE & CLAY
The Films of Kevin Jerome Everson at Abrams Planetarium
Friday, October 9, 5–7 p.m.
Abrams Planetarium
Michigan State University
755 Science Rd, East Lansing, MI 48824
Free admission
Abrams Planetarium
Michigan State University
755 Science Rd, East Lansing, MI 48824
Free admission
Introduction from Media City Film Festival and Broad Underground, followed by a conversation between filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson and film scholar Yasmina Price.
Media City Film Festival (MCFF), Trinosophes Projects, and the Broad Underground Film Series at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum and the Film Studies Program at Michigan State University present Starshine & Clay: The Films of Kevin Jerome Everson at Abrams Planetarium. This screening is curated by Media City Film Festival Artistic Director Oona Mosna.
Starshine & Clay features ten films by celebrated African American artist and filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson, exploring the space where the celestial meets the earthly, the cosmic meets the bodily, and the everyday meets the miraculous. This program maps the astonishing scale between solar totality and the intimate worlds of human experience, bringing together two of Everson’s early celestial films, Polly One (2018) and Condor (2019), with works that traverse sonic and spiritual worlds, acts of illusion, vernacular knowledge, rituals of performance, aging, care, and the inevitability of death. Throughout, Everson’s cinema finds the extraordinary not by leaving the everyday behind but by attending to it with precision, returning to ordinary objects and experiences as sites of possibility. A gesture becomes choreography, ritual becomes apparition, and voices become living archives. Starshine & Clay evokes a continual movement between worlds, asking us to look upward, outward, and again at what is immediately present to consider what might become visible when the familiar is seen in its place among the stars.
Kevin Jerome Everson will be in attendance to celebrate the completion of Gises (2026), a new celestial film created in the metro Detroit region, commissioned by Media City Film Festival with support from the Knight Arts Foundation. Gises is having its limited world premiere as an installation at the Detroit Public Library’s Main Branch in the Clara Stanton Jones Friends Auditorium (October 15–November 14). Everson’s events in the region unite many partners, including the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, the Film Studies Program at Michigan State University, Warren Astronomical Society, Abrams Planetarium, Detroit Public Library, NOVA24 Photo + Film Festival, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council. Gises (2026) is a production of trilobite-arts DAC and Picture Palace Pictures. All films appear courtesy of the artist, trilobite-arts DAC, and Picture Palace Pictures. Images © Kevin Jerome Everson, courtesy the artist, trilobite-arts DAC, and Picture Palace Pictures. Starshine & Clay is dedicated to the Everson family and to the memory of Kim Duane Elliott.
Media City Film Festival (MCFF), Trinosophes Projects, and the Broad Underground Film Series at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum and the Film Studies Program at Michigan State University present Starshine & Clay: The Films of Kevin Jerome Everson at Abrams Planetarium. This screening is curated by Media City Film Festival Artistic Director Oona Mosna.
Starshine & Clay features ten films by celebrated African American artist and filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson, exploring the space where the celestial meets the earthly, the cosmic meets the bodily, and the everyday meets the miraculous. This program maps the astonishing scale between solar totality and the intimate worlds of human experience, bringing together two of Everson’s early celestial films, Polly One (2018) and Condor (2019), with works that traverse sonic and spiritual worlds, acts of illusion, vernacular knowledge, rituals of performance, aging, care, and the inevitability of death. Throughout, Everson’s cinema finds the extraordinary not by leaving the everyday behind but by attending to it with precision, returning to ordinary objects and experiences as sites of possibility. A gesture becomes choreography, ritual becomes apparition, and voices become living archives. Starshine & Clay evokes a continual movement between worlds, asking us to look upward, outward, and again at what is immediately present to consider what might become visible when the familiar is seen in its place among the stars.
Kevin Jerome Everson will be in attendance to celebrate the completion of Gises (2026), a new celestial film created in the metro Detroit region, commissioned by Media City Film Festival with support from the Knight Arts Foundation. Gises is having its limited world premiere as an installation at the Detroit Public Library’s Main Branch in the Clara Stanton Jones Friends Auditorium (October 15–November 14). Everson’s events in the region unite many partners, including the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, the Film Studies Program at Michigan State University, Warren Astronomical Society, Abrams Planetarium, Detroit Public Library, NOVA24 Photo + Film Festival, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council. Gises (2026) is a production of trilobite-arts DAC and Picture Palace Pictures. All films appear courtesy of the artist, trilobite-arts DAC, and Picture Palace Pictures. Images © Kevin Jerome Everson, courtesy the artist, trilobite-arts DAC, and Picture Palace Pictures. Starshine & Clay is dedicated to the Everson family and to the memory of Kim Duane Elliott.
Polly One, 6 min, 16mm > digital, 2018
Polly One is about 99% totality. Filmed in Saluda, North Carolina, during the solar eclipse on August 21, 2017.
Polly One is about 99% totality. Filmed in Saluda, North Carolina, during the solar eclipse on August 21, 2017.
The Wood Thrush and the Bobwhite Quail, 4:30 min, 16mm > digital, 2025
The Wood Thrush and the Bobwhite Quail is a film about birdwatchers in Washington D.C. and in Tennessee being summoned by Glenn Goins and George Clinton.
The Wood Thrush and the Bobwhite Quail is a film about birdwatchers in Washington D.C. and in Tennessee being summoned by Glenn Goins and George Clinton.
IFO, 9.5 min, 16mm > digital, 2017
In Everson’s hometown of Mansfield, Ohio, multiple UFO sightings yield both passionate firsthand accounts and detailed reflections; meanwhile, suburban youths raise their arms toward the heavens in becalmed surrender.
In Everson’s hometown of Mansfield, Ohio, multiple UFO sightings yield both passionate firsthand accounts and detailed reflections; meanwhile, suburban youths raise their arms toward the heavens in becalmed surrender.
Three Quarters, 4 min, 16mm > digital, 2015
Two Philadelphia magicians, Donald E. Camp and Ran'D Shine, practice sleight of hand tricks.
Two Philadelphia magicians, Donald E. Camp and Ran'D Shine, practice sleight of hand tricks.
Ears, Nose, and Throat, 10.5 min, 16mm > digital, 2016
“This short documentary of a young African American woman is made of two parts:—the titular doctor’s visit, and the woman’s oral history interwoven together in image and sound. This clean portraiture offers a lucid approach to an idea of considerable force. Everson both stretches and collapses the distance between the human body as a site for perception and the body as a physical thing that can be damaged.” –Daniel Kasman
“This short documentary of a young African American woman is made of two parts:—the titular doctor’s visit, and the woman’s oral history interwoven together in image and sound. This clean portraiture offers a lucid approach to an idea of considerable force. Everson both stretches and collapses the distance between the human body as a site for perception and the body as a physical thing that can be damaged.” –Daniel Kasman
Condor, 8 min, 16mm > digital, 2019
The July 2, 2019, solar eclipse, filmed in 100% totality over the Chilean coast. The condor is the national bird of Chile.
The July 2, 2019, solar eclipse, filmed in 100% totality over the Chilean coast. The condor is the national bird of Chile.
Traveling Shoes, 7 min, 16mm > digital, 2019
Traveling Shoes is based on the hit record by the Ohio-based gospel group, The Brown Singers.
Traveling Shoes is based on the hit record by the Ohio-based gospel group, The Brown Singers.
Ninety-Three, 3 min, 16mm > digital, 2008
A man blows out 93 candles on his birthday.
A man blows out 93 candles on his birthday.
Rita Larson’s Boy, 11 min, 16mm > digital, 2012
Ten actors audition for the role of Rollo Larson in the 1970s sitcom Sanford and Son. One of a series of films based on famous people and objects from Columbus, Mississippi. The actor Nathaniel Taylor, raised in Columbus, portrayed Rollo (Rita Larson’s boy) in the television series.
Ten actors audition for the role of Rollo Larson in the 1970s sitcom Sanford and Son. One of a series of films based on famous people and objects from Columbus, Mississippi. The actor Nathaniel Taylor, raised in Columbus, portrayed Rollo (Rita Larson’s boy) in the television series.
Grand Finale, 5 min, digital, 2015
The end of a lovely evening, July 4th weekend, Detroit.
The end of a lovely evening, July 4th weekend, Detroit.
ABOUT KEVIN JEROME EVERSON
Kevin Jerome Everson (USA) is an artist and filmmaker born in Mansfield, Ohio in 1965. He has completed more than 300 solo and collaborative shorts and feature-length films since 1997, quietly assembling one of the most remarkable collections of contemporary African American life ever committed to cinema. Everson’s films frequently depict Black working-class communities, stretching across a variety of themes and subjects including migration, illusion, astronomy, human kinetics, entomology, musicology, ornithology, historical reenactment, and the folktale. He received a BFA from the University of Akron and an MFA from Ohio University (1990). His films have been exhibited widely at festivals, museums, and galleries internationally, including Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, BlackStar Film Festival, New York Film Festival, HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, Toronto International Film Festival, Walker Art Center, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Locarno Film Festival and Venice Film Festival. He has received retrospectives at Cinéma du Réel, Centre Pompidou, Harvard Film Archive, Tate Modern, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Seoul, Visions du Réel, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Media City Film Festival. His work has been featured at the 2008, 2012, and 2017 Whitney Biennials, the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, the 2018 Carnegie International, the 2023 Contour Biennale, and the 2024 Thailand Biennale. He has received an American Academy in Rome Prize (2002), a Herb Alpert Award (2012), a Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities (2019), an American Academy in Berlin Prize (2020), a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants and commissions from Creative Capital, Just Films/Ford Foundation and Sundance Art of Non-Fiction. Media City Film Festival has screened more than 50 films by Everson since 2009. He lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he is the Commonwealth and Ruffin Foundation Distinguished Professor of Studio Art, Director of Studio Arts, University of Virginia.
ABOUT YASMINA PRICE
Yasmina Price is a New York–based writer and film programmer. She is devoted to visual culture from the African continent and diaspora, anticolonial cinema, and the experimental work of women filmmakers. Her programming has been featured at Anthology Film Archives, Light Industry, Maysles Documentary Center, e-flux, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pan African Film & Arts Festival, and the National Gallery of Art. Her writing has appeared in edited volumes and museum catalogues, and has been published in the Nation, Criterion’s Current, the Baffler, MUBI’s Notebook, Hammer & Hope, Film Quarterly, World Records Journal and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Black Studies and Film & Media Studies from Yale University.
ABOUT OONA MOSNA
Oona Mosna (Canada) is an artist, author, curator, and the 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, and hundreds more at venues including 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 grassroots venues worldwide. As an accomplished producer, she has commissioned dozens of films which have screened at Tate Modern, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Venice Film Festival, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, Academy Museum of Motion Picture Arts, New York Film Festival, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, as well as her living room, kitchen, and backyard. She lives and works in Windsor–Detroit and internationally.
Read about the event GISES A New Celestial Film by Kevin Jerome Everson at Detroit Public Library
Film stills © Kevin Jerome Everson courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC and Picture Palace Pictures.