On Site is a moving image series rooted in senses of place, focusing on contemporary and historic artists’ cinema. The series draws from a diversity of works that commonly recruits cinematic form to attend enduring and ephemeral environments.

December 14

Doors 6:30 Screening at 7:00 PM

Free

A Common Sequence

Mary Helena Clark and Mike Gibisser

HD, 2023 80 min

Within the human struggle to live and work on a changing planet, questions of value, extraction, and

adaptation echo across seemingly disparate worlds. A Common Sequence examines shifts of life and

labor via a critically endangered salamander and plant patents in the apple industry. Weaving the stories

of Dominican nuns running a conservation lab, a group of fishermen attempting to live off of a depleting

lake, engineers developing AI-driven harvesting machines, and an indigenous biomedical researcher

resisting the commodification of human DNA, the film becomes a meditation on the shifting border

between the natural and unnatural world, and the dynamics of power at play. (Mike Gibisser, 2023)

Upcoming January 25

At Sea

Peter Hutton

16mm, 2007 60 min

SAVE THESE DATES for forthcoming screenings here at MMCP

Feb. 29

Mar. 28

April 25

See you soon!

Curated by David Dinnell, Ellen Ito, Jay Kuehner

David Dinnell is a film programmer currently living in Seattle. He is the former Program Director of the

Ann Arbor Film Festival, Media City Film Festival and the Tacoma Film Festival. He has curated film

programs for the Flaherty Film Seminar, The Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento (Buenos Aires),

UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art (NYC), Canyon Cinema 50, among others. He is co-founder and

co-curator of Mur Murs, an ongoing Los Angeles-based series presenting artists and cinema.

Ellen Ito is an artist, programmer, and curator raised in the Lower Duwamish Valley, residing in Tacoma

and Seattle, Washington. Current and upcoming projects include the exhibition Soft Power, on view at

TAM through September 2024, the curation of Future Forward (Jan. 2024 at MMCP), and the

documentary Following Gordon. Ellen is the Curator of Special Projects at the Tacoma Art Museum.

Jay Kuehner is an independent film critic, curator, and educator based in the Pacific Northwest whose

focus is on creative nonfiction and documentary practice. His work has appeared in Cinema Scope,

Senses of Cinema, Film Comment, IndieWire and Sight and Sound.