an artist-run, nomadic film series screening experimental and avant-garde, fiction, documentary, and animated film + video in Detroit, Michigan since 2012.
screening schedules and program line-ups can be found here and on our Facebook page.
Mothlight Microcinema is excited to present Paradise, a collection of films by Charlottesville-based filmmaker Lydia Moyer.
Paradise focuses on seven American communities that no longer exist, quietly investigating their abandoned sites in order to consider who and what we are comfortable remembering. The sites include Wounded Knee in South Dakota; Centralia, an erstwhile mining town in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania; and the site of Jonestown in Guyana. Taking documentary, poetry, and contemporary landscape photography as its foundations, Paradise is a record of the historical and the personal. It is as much about the past as it is a meditation on the present and the meaning of home and community.
Moyer’s body of work draws alternately on her training in experimental video and documentary production, culminating in a hybrid of the two—a kind of poetic nonfiction. She is as interested in reading landscapes for insight into the values of the cultures that inhabit, protect, or otherwise exploit them. Moyer received a BFA from the New York State School of Art and Design at Alfred in 1999 and an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2005, where she was a recipient of the Weiss Urban Livability Fellowship. Her work has been screened nationally and internationally in festivals and exhibitions including the Black Maria Film Festival in Jersey City, NJ, the Impakt Festival in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and the 700is Festival in Egilstaddir, Iceland, where she was awarded the film of the festival prize in 2006. She has been named a 2009-10 individual artist fellow in film and video at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, VA. She lives and works in rural Virginia.
