UNDERGROUND MINES
UNDERGROUND MINES: Canadian Artists' Cinema in South America is an ongoing multi-venue tour, commission and research project designed to celebrate Canadian and South American analogue film.
Commissioned Canadian participants have toured to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Chile to create new works on 16mm and 35mm film. The project also provides a platform for exchange between South American and Canadian artist filmmakers, exposing new audiences to rarely screened works from the Canadian avant-garde film canon (1960-2020).
Research of historical and contemporary schools, figures and artworks are conducted at libraries, archives and during in-person meetings at studios, labs, museums and elsewhere.
UNDERGROUND MINES presentations have taken place at the 12th Bienal de Artes Mediales, Palacio La Moneda, Museo Nacional Bellas Artes, and Cineteca Nacional in Santiago, Chile; Fronteira International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival in Brazil, Museo de Arte Moderno Buenos Aires, and others.
UNDERGROUND MINES is curated and organized by Media City Film Festival Director, Oona Mosna and is an expansion of Media City's Mobile Frames Residency Series. The project is an initiative that aims to establish ongoing "Free-Form Residencies" for artists working exclusively with analogue film.
MEDIA CITY is an annual international festival dedicated artists’ film, founded in Windsor, Ontario, Canada in 1994. MCFF takes place in Windsor and Detroit, Michigan making it the only organization in the world to regularly exhibit and promote artists’ film on both sides of an international border.
UNDERGROUND MINES is an ongoing initiative open to creating bespoke commissions, screenings, exhibitions, lectures, tours and exchange internationally. For more information please contact us.
Screening programs have been presented in partnership with the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC) and other organizations around the world. We would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council for their support, and the National Film Board of Canada for the loan of artwork by Arthur Lipsett.
CURRENT COMMISSION ARTISTS
Daïchi Saïto is a filmmaker based in Montréal and is co-founder of Double Negative Collective. His work has been widely exhibited in major film festivals, museums, galleries and cinematheques worldwide.
John Price is an independent filmmaker from Toronto. He has created extensive body of work since 1986, employing original alchemical experimentation with a wide range of motion picture film emulsions, and camera formats. He is a celebrated cinematorgrapher and has created projections for theatre and opera.
Malena Szlam was born in Santiago, Chile. She studied visual arts at Universidad de Artes y Ciencias Sociales and cinema at Concordia University. Her works have recently been exhibited at the Rotterdam, New York and Toronto International Film Festivals. She is member of the Double Negative Collective in Montréal.
FOUNDER / CURATOR / ORGANIZER
Oona Mosna is Program Director of Media City Film Festival. She has curated hundreds of single artists’ screenings, retrospectives and exhibitions. She lives and works in Windsor / Detroit.
