How to Rust

Julia Yezbick, 25 min. (2016)

How to Rust is a short essay film that explores the mythologies of Detroit through the material metaphors of Olayami Dabls’ installation piece called: “Iron teaching Rocks How to Rust.” Dabls’ installation is a metaphor for the forced assimilation of Africans to European culture and language. Here Dabls’ bricolage of the postindustrial landscape becomes a commentary on the half-life of Fordism, where the relationship between cultural production, history, and place is recast, revealing larger truths about how we mythologize a former glory and shape an imagined future.

It premiered at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2016 and won the ProCam Best Regional Filmmaker Award.