Kings of the Sky

Deborah Stratman, one of this year's Wexner Center Residency Award recipients in media arts, introduces her experimental documentary Kings of the Sky.

The film follows a famed Uyghur tightrope artist, Adil Hoxur, and his troupe as they tour the small desert towns of western China. Stratman also shows The Magician's House, one of the two films she's currently working on in the center's Art & Technology studio.(6 mins., 16mm)

In Kings of the Sky, Stratman chronicles not only the gravity-defying performances of the Uyghurs, an indigenous Turkic-speaking Muslim group who live in China's Xinjiang province, but also their struggle for religious and political autonomy under an increasingly oppressive Chinese government. (68 mins., video)