USA/2024 — dir. Mark Stryker | 78 min.

You can’t tell the history of Jazz without telling the story of Detroit. The Best of the Best: Jazz from Detroit explores the lives of the city’s innovative and influential musicians during Detroit’s dramatic rise as an industrial power.

Scores of world-class musicians have rolled off Detroit’s assembly line, nurtured by the profound legacy of mentors such as Barry Harris, Marcus Belgrave, and Rodney Whitaker. The Best of the Best: Jazz from Detroit reminds audiences how and why the city has become the once and future crossroads for American Jazz masters. 

Tickets for all Freep Film Festival screenings hosted at Detroit Film Theatre are available in advance at freepfilmfestival.com. 

Produced by the Detroit Free Press, the Freep Film Festival focuses on documentaries, especially those with connections to Detroit and Michigan. Screenings include in-depth discussions with directors, film subjects, and community members. Freep Film Festival also presents live events at venues throughout metro Detroit, with activities centered in the downtown core.
 

USA/2023 — dir. Mitch McCabe | 75 min.

Part verité essay, part political diary, 23 Mile is an experimental nonfiction film that follows Michigan citizens during the difficult, tumultuous year that was 2020, where political events included a plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer and the world went into COVID lockdown. McCabe's film shows the full scope of humanity, though, and makes viewers question their assumptions about race, class, social status, and geographical demographics.

Filmmaker Magazine called 23 Mile an "endlessly fascinating and elegantly crafted 78-minute video diary...which serves as a much-needed cinematic reminder that uncomplicated narratives that simply confirm our preconceived notions do a disservice to us all."

Tickets for all Freep Film Festival screenings hosted at Detroit Film Theatre are available in advance at freepfilmfestival.com.

Produced by the Detroit Free Press, the Freep Film Festival focuses on documentaries, especially those with connections to Detroit and Michigan. Screenings include in-depth discussions with directors, film subjects, and community members. Freep Film Festival also presents live events at venues throughout metro Detroit, with activities centered in the downtown core. 

USA/2024 — directed by Carla Gutierrez | 87 min.

An intimately raw and magical journey through the life, mind, and heart of iconic artist Frida Kahlo, told through her own words for the very first time. Brought to life through lyrical animation, this film uses Kahlo's illustrated diary, revealing letters, essays, and candid print interviews as source material. Frida is the feature film directorial debut of acclaimed editor Carla Gutiérrez (RBG, La Corona). 

Tickets for all Freep Film Festival screenings hosted at Detroit Film Theatre are available in advance at freepfilmfestival.com. 

Produced by the Detroit Free Press, the Freep Film Festival focuses on documentaries, especially those with connections to Detroit and Michigan. Screenings include in-depth discussions with directors, film subjects, and community members. Freep Film Festival also presents live events at venues throughout metro Detroit, with activities centered in the downtown core.
 

The DIA auxiliary Friends of Art & Flowers (FAF) presents its 24th annual Elizabeth Sites Kuhlman Lecture and Luncheon Monday, April 29, at 10:30 a.m.

This year’s speaker is French Master Florist Frédéric Dupré. One of the world’s premiere floral designers and teachers, Dupré was named  Best Craftsman in France in 2011 and was a competitor for the World Cup title in 2015. He will focus on architecture and texture, designing only with organic materials to enlighten and entertain lecture attendees. 

Fashioned around 1695 and attributed to Gottfried Wolffram, the DIA’s amber casket exemplifies the early modern practice of using materials from formerly living organisms and the inorganic materials whose extraction adversely affected the environment. Comprising amber, ivory, wood, velvet, paper, gold, and brass, the casket's diverse materials not only showcase artistic versatility but also hint at environmental impacts in regions like Prussia, Lithuania, Sweden, East Africa, and the Americas. 

Contrasting sharply with our contemporary, often limited grasp of the origins, processing, and assembly of materials, early modern craftspeople and the European elites had a far deeper understanding of artifacts’ structural logic and their constituent materials. This tacit knowledge, increasingly recognized as “material literacy,” profoundly shaped the interpretation and appreciation of art. With this backdrop, Dr. Tomasz Grusiecki will investigate how early modern Europeans understood the materials that make up the DIA’s casket. He will examine the range of responses elicited by the scarcity, abundance, and ecological implications of various artistic media. Investigating the materials’ relationship to the natural world, as well as their extraction, refinement, and recycling, this lecture will provide insights into how environmental concerns of the period endowed art with added meaning and value. 

About the lecturer: Dr. Tomasz Grusiecki is Associate Professor of Early Modern European Art and Material Cultures at Boise State University. His research encompasses early modern cultural entanglements, European perceptions of the wider world, eco-critical examinations of artistic materials, and zoopolitics of art-making, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe from 1500 to 1700. He is the author of Transcultural Things and the Spectre of Orientalism in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania (Manchester University Press, 2023). 

 
Photo: Courtly amber casket, ca. 1695, attributed to Gottfried Wolffram. Collection: Detroit Institute of Arts, Museum Purchase, Robert H. Tannahill Foundation Fund.

Chinese Pipa Master Gao Hong and Syrian oudist Issam Rafea perform music from their 2020 album “From Our World to Yours,” which has received two Gold Medals in from the Global Music Awards. Hong and Rafea are both prolific composers and improvisers.

This collaboration brings sounds from ancient Asian dynasties and the Middle East to present music of great charm and elegance.

Since her debut while still a graduate student at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music, pianist Aki Takahashi has been at the center of new music performances at venues around the world. Well known for her classical musicianship, Takahashi is also lauded for her interpretations of contemporary works by composers such as John Cage, Isang Yun, and her brother Yuji Takahashi.

Her series of Erik Satie concerts in Tokyo during the 1970s triggered a Satie boom throughout Japan, and in 1980 she began a collaboration with American composer Morton Feldman that produced multiple landmark recordings. 

(USA/2023—dir. Hamoody Jaafar)

In the 1950s, legendary high school basketball coach Lofton Greene led the recently racially integrated River Rouge High School Panthers to a record number of state championships in a league made up of segregated schools. Now, almost 70 years later, former Panther LaMonta Stone has returned to the struggling industrial town of River Rouge to help the Panthers chase the school's 15th State Championship. 

In this coming-of-age story, Stone and four student athletes strive to fulfill generations' worth of work, on and off the court. The film includes appearances by Michigan State Basketball's head coach Tom Izzo, Detroit Pistons announcer George Blaha, and longtime Free Press high school sportswriter Mick McCabe.

Produced by the Detroit Free Press, the Freep Film Festival focuses on documentaries, especially those with connections to Detroit and Michigan. Screenings include in-depth discussions with directors, film subjects, and community members. Freep Film Festival also presents live events at venues throughout metro Detroit, with activities centered in the downtown core. 

Tickets for all Freep Film Festival screenings hosted at Detroit Film Theatre are available in advance at freepfilmfestival.com.
 

The Detroit Institute of Arts invites you to join us for the inaugural Byron and Dorothy Gerson Lecture Series, in partnership with the William Davidson Foundation. Franklin Sirmans, director of the Perez Art Museum Miami will present on the topic; A View from the Crossroads: A 21st Century American Museum.

This talk will explore the recent history of the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Working with modern and contemporary art, the museum has sought to be a leader in presenting the work of Latin America and the Caribbean while highlighting African diasporic and US Latino art. This talk will present artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Marisol, Warhol, Leandro Erlich and exhibitions like NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith and Futbol: The Beautiful Game.

Brad Felt was a tuba and euphonium player, composer, educator and a mainstay on the Detroit Jazz scene in the 1980s and 1990s before his death in 2011. Saxophonist/ flutist Steve Wood has assembled a band featuring Terry Kimura on trombone, Duncan McMillan on organ and Dave Zwolinski on drums. The results are a fitting tribute and an opportunity to hear the music of a Detroit Jazz original.