FILM + MUSIC: Malcolm Le Grice + Matana Roberts/Coin Coin for Media City Film Festival Opening Night

MOCAD and Media City Film Festival presentMalcom Le Grice + Matana Roberts/Coin CoinTuesday, July 28, 8pmAdmission: $5 (free for MOCAD members and Media City attendees) MOCAD is honored to continue to host the opening night of Media City Film Festival, an international event held annually in Detroit and Windsor and now in its 21st year. Malcolm Le Grice (b.1940) is one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of artists' cinema. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, founded the London Filmmakers' Co-op Workshop in the late 1960s, and was a founding member of the legendary Filmaktion group, endorsing a more active, improvisational and participatory experience of cinema that re-envisioned the possibilities for film as a live event. LeGrice also carried out the first experiments with computer-based filmmaking in Britain. His works have screened at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and Vienna; the Louvre, Paris; Tate Modern and Tate Britain; Documenta, Kassel; the Paris Biennale, and the Fondacion Joan Miró in Barcelona. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou; the Royal Belgian Film Archive; the National Film Library of Australia; the German Cinematheque, and L’ Archives du Film Experimental D'Avignon. He has written extensive critical and theoretical publications, including a history of experimental cinema 'Abstract Film and Beyond' (Studio Vista and MIT, 1977), and ’Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age’ (British Film Institute, 2001). Le Grice is Professor Emeritus of the University of the Arts London.  Matana Roberts is an internationally renowned composer, band leader, saxophonist, sound experimentalist, and mixed-media practitioner. Roberts works in many contexts and mediums, including improvisation, dance, poetry, and theater. Roberts has been called “a major talent” (The Wire) and “the spokeswoman for a new, politically conscious and refractory Jazz scene” (Jazzthetik). She presents the Detroit premiere of 'Coin Coin Chapter Three (river run thee)'. The ongoing Coin Coin project, a multi-chapter work of “panoramic sound quilting,” aims to expose the mystical roots and channel the intuitive spirit-raising traditions of American creative expression while maintaining a deep and substantive engagement with history, community, and political expression within improvisational music.   With DJ sets from Ephraim Asili, an artist, filmmaker, DJ, radio host, and traveler, who won the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at this year's Ann Arbor Film Festival.