Oona Mosna

Production

Oona Mosna

Windsor, Ontario

Oona Mosna is an artist, author and curator living and working in Windsor-Detroit and internationally. She has organized thousands of single screenings, retrospectives and performances with artists including Yoko Ono, Mati Diop, Barabara Hammer, Sergei Loznitza, Apichatpong Weerastethakul, Ephraim Asili, Valie Export, Kevin Jerome Everson, Artavadz Pelechian and hundreds more for venues including the Toronto International Film Festival, The Presidential Palace (Santiago, Chile) and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Mosna has also produced dozens of avant garde films which have screened at The Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, the Berlinale, New York Film Festival, etc. She is director of Media City Film Festival since 2005.

Acting credits

Behind the camera

Grand Finale poster
NR

KJE captures the grand finale of Emancipation Day, the annual Detroit River Fireworks, in 2014. Founded by Walter Perry, Emancipation Day was celebrated in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, every August 1 from 1932–1967 to mark the anniversary of British Parliment’s abolishment of slavery in 1834. Also known as The Greatest Freedom Show on Earth, the festival was large enough at one time to double the city’s population. As Emancipation Day became increasingly associated with the Freedom Movement across the border, the Windsor Police Department and city council began to push against the event, eventually culminating in its cancellation in reaction to the Detroit rebellion in 1967.

Grand Finale

2015

Fish Point poster
NR

An impressionist, kinetic exploration through the natural landscape of Fish Point Provincial Nature Reserve on Pelee Island (Ontario, Canada).

Fish Point

2015

earthearthearth poster
8.5

The expansive mountainscapes of the Andes are the basis for this new, 35mm film by Daïchi Saïto. Once again propelled by the free, pulsating improvisation of saxophonist Jason Sharp, in which his heartbeat and breathing play a prominent role, the series of images slowly becomes more abstract. The end result is a hypnotic, sensory meditation on ‘our’ earth.

earthearthearth

2021

Fluid Frontiers poster
6.0

Shot in Detroit and Windsor, Fluid Frontiers is the culmination of Ephraim Asili's project exploring the artist's relationship with the African Diaspora, structured around unrehearsed readings of poems originally published by the Detroit-based Broadside Press.

Fluid Frontiers

2018

Altiplano poster
5.2

Filmed in the Andean Mountains in the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymara, and Calchaquí-Diaguita in Northern Chile and Northwest Argentina, ALTIPLANO takes place within a geological universe of ancestral salt flats, volcanic deserts, and coloured lakes. Fusing earth with sky, day with night, heartbeat with mountain, and mineral with iridescent cloud, ALTIPLANO reveals a vibrating landscape in which a bright blue sun threatens to eclipse a blood-red moon.

Altiplano

2018

The Newest Olds poster
8.0

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), Mazollo’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.

The Newest Olds

2022

Red Green poster
NR

A study in contrast, colour and moiré pattern in a public park in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. The film connects with a series of paintings by visual artist, Angela Allen.

Red Green

2012

AGW 2nd Floor South poster
NR

Shot during a residency at Media City Film Festival and the Art Gallery of Windsor, "AGW 2nd Floor South" is part of a trilogy of works that use three distinct filmic procedures. Shot with a wide angle (10mm) lens at a rate of one frame every twenty seconds "AGW 2nd Floor South" compressed an entire day into two minutes. The work confirms, yet again, both Vertov and Kracauer's conviction that film can reveal aspects of the world otherwise inaccessible to human vision.

AGW 2nd Floor South

2012

Desert Series II – Payogasta poster
NR

Filmed along the border between Argentina and Chile, "Desert Series II – Payogasta" is the next chapter in Price's luscious landscape project, "Sea Series" (2008-2016). Price makes use of the optical and mechanical possibilities of analog cinema, and the incredible landscape of the Andean mountains to create alchemical spells that swirl across the screen. Desert Series II – Payogasta is one of a few new films created by this celebrated avant-garde filmmaker, as part of Media City Film Festival's Underground Mines project.

Desert Series II – Payogasta

Renaissance Center / GM Tower poster
NR

An artificial animation of the repetitively cycling GM logo sequence and naturally occurring movements, such as clouds reflected in the tower’s windows. This grid of flat planes breaks the reflections up into rectangular fragments that resemble film in both its appearance and manner of operation.

Renaissance Center / GM Tower

2012

Michigan Central Station poster
NR

A single time-lapse shot of the abandoned Michigan Central Station in Detroit. Recording subtle changes in light as it pierces the hollow skeleton of the building, the film was made at a rate of one frame every ten seconds. Part of a series of 7 films completed by the artist in Windsor-Detroit.

Michigan Central Station

2012

Desert Series I – Atacama poster
NR

Filmed along the border between Argentina and Chile, "Desert Series I – Atacama" is the next chapter in Price's luscious landscape project, "Sea Series" (2008-2016). Price makes use of the optical and mechanical possibilities of analog cinema, and the incredible landscape of the Andean mountains to create alchemical spells that swirl across the screen. "Desert Series I – Atacama" is one of a few new films created by this celebrated avant-garde filmmaker that were commissioned by Media City Film Festival's Underground Mines project.

Desert Series I – Atacama

Totem Pole – '67 poster
NR

"Totem Pole '67" was shot frame by frame using extension tubes between the lens and camera body of a 16mm Bolex. The physical form of the subject comes directly to determine the outcome: it is both subject and camera support, that is, part of the technology of which it is also the subject. It is both sculpture and film.

Totem Pole – '67

2012