SATURDAY, MARCH 30 TRAILERS & EVENT LISTINGS:

Films in Competition 10: Almost All Ages (Ages 6+) 
11 am | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium | $6
A family-friendly program of narrative, documentary, experimental, and animated films: Clean Slate (David Opdyke), The Art of Living While Being Left Behind (Claudia Franzen), Water Cycle (Tom Hansell), Orbit (Tess Martin), Silo (Gina Kamentskey), Circus Movements (Lukas Berger and Mário Gajo de Carvalho), Jane La Onda – “Fly” (TRLLM (K8 Howl, Jak Ritger)), RGBebop / Anthropology (Luigi Allemano), Code Ruth (Caroline Voagen Nelson), DREAMLAND (Mirai Mizue).  

<3 and Landscape of Absence
Feature in Competition
1:00pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
Across different genres and eras of Western film history, female protagonists from 70 well-known movies set out in search of each other in Landscape of Absence (Verena Looser and Melina Weissenborn). In <3 (LNZ), a loosely woven, spiraling death odyssey of the night, LNZ’s body moves through different forms of digital imagery until finally being uploaded to the Internet to live forever. Formally, it’s a 60-minute selfie, lol. It’s also a coming-of-age story in a technological communications revolution where love gets uploaded, digitally dislocated, unseen, and lost, bit by bit, into an asynchronous Internet landscape <3.

Films in Competition 11
1:15 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Recent experimental, documentary, and animated films: New Panther: A Call for Action (Sage Love and Nola Asantewaa), Armed Lullaby (Yana Ugrekhelidze), Sonant (Timothy David Orme), Sketches and Portraits for Jean-Michel (Ephraim Asili), Girls Grow Up Drawing Horses (Joanie Wind), Winter in Eden (Maren Hahnfeld), The Yellow Mazda and His Holiness (Sandra Heremans).

Remnants of a Dream
Special Program 
3 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
There are five types of memory: long-term, short-term, explicit, implicit, and autobiographical. Through these forms of memory, we retain a limited amount of information. Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs reality. Reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fail. Seldom do we fully remember our dreams after sleep, only remnants. These remnants are reconstructed into a new narrative that our memory shapes. Remnants of a Dream is a short film program that functions as a recollection of global black experiences. Our memory can be a rekindling of the moments that shook us most -- a pool party gone wrong, a summer on the brink, a disaster within the days of youth, our ancestral struggles, and our own desires. Memories are infinite time capsules, repurposed, and passed on. We must will ourselves to confront the memories that affect us the most. The brevity of the 10 films included in this program spark the rekindling and manipulation of memories toward paths of healing. Curated and presented by Amir George.

Films in Competition 12
3:15 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Recent experimental, documentary, and animated films: The Air of the Earth in Your Lungs (Ross Meckfessel), The Redness of Red (Emily Downe), Between Relating and Use (Nazli Dinçel), Call of Comfort (Brenda Lien), Haus der Regierung / Government House (Herwig Weiser), Realms (Patrik Söderlund), The Moons of Palaver (Eric Gaucher), Driving Dinosaurs (Emma Piper-Burket). 

Nothing or Everything
Feature in Competition 
5 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
In both the past and the present, two people walk deep into a mountain forest. For these two women born and raised in the city, there is no place more unfamiliar. It is a place where all kinds of living things are breathing. In Nothing or Everything (Gyeol Kim), two people in the present climb the mountain, following two people from the past.

My Friend the Polish Girl with Object Dream and CUT COPY SPHINX
Feature in Competition
5:15 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
In Object Dream (Kyungwon Song), the process of drawing images on an object and moving them is a process of animating – of bringing them to life. As they become a subject, they become animated, and eventually, we can watch what they dream about. CUT COPY SPHINX (Virginia Lee Montgomery) is a surreal, sculptural short art film about metaphysics, myth, and destruction. A feminist twist on the classical myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx, CUT COPY SPHINX recasts the sphinx as the uncanny hero who endures “cuts” across time. Shot en plein air on a miniature prop set with a DeWalt drill and a gallon of honey, CUT COPY SPHINX syncs philosophy, feminism, and image theory. Cannes and Telluride nominee Ewa Banaszkiewicz and Mateusz Dymek create a fiction film that takes the form of a first-time filmmaker’s documentary. My Friend the Polish Girl borrows from cinema verité and video bloggers to create a rare naturalism in style and performance. The result is a fiction film that watches as an experimental documentary told through the eyes (and lens) of amateur filmmaker Katie Broughton.

Looking in the Mirror, I See Me – Early Women’s Video Art from the Video Data Bank Collection
Special Program
7 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
"The emergence of video art tools in the late 1960s and early 1970s paved the way for outstanding art works by women. Captivated by the relative accessibility, portability, and immediacy of Sony’s Video Portapak system, female artists began to experiment with the video format. Often taking a direct-to-camera approach, many of the resulting works reflect the burgeoning feminist movement in the U.S. at the time. The videos in this program, all made by women artists active in the 1970s -- video’s first decade -- occupy a number of positions and points of view in relation to women’s role in society." --Abina Manning, VDB Executive Director

Films in Competition 13
7:15 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Recent experimental, documentary, and animated films: Random Thoughts (Steven Vander Meer), Underbelly Up (Joshua Yates), Eastern District Terminal (Michael Gitlin), Winners Bitch (Sam Gurry), Burkina Brandenburg Komplex (Ulu Braun), horses in the year of the dog (Terra Long), sun moon wind plant animal (Tom Bartlett), A Sequence of Events (Michael Edwards), Hi I Need to Be Loved (Marnie Ellen Hertzler), iBooks (Sarah Odile Postic), Begin (Craig Smith).

Wada’s World: Wrestling with Existence
Special Program
9:00pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
Wada Atsushi is one of the top animators in Japan. This is not that highly conventionalized and capitalized animation also known as anime. Rather, Wada presents his own strange, wonderful, and instantly recognizable world through his .3mm sharp pen. In Wada’s world, humans enjoy a peculiar relationship to the living things around them. His drawings of the animal kingdom may look relatively realistic, but his creatures emit an uncanny sense of anthropomorphization from deep inside their feral forms. Wada writes, “I like animals that give me space for thinking.” Space -- or ma in Japanese -- is a central concept for Wada’s practice. His visual space has the twisty-turny cyclical structures of Escher, and his soundtrack is punctuated by empty blanks inspired by composer Takemitsu Toru. Thus, ma in Wada’s oeuvre is not a cultural essence, but rather something arriving from Wada’s own artistic sensibility; one can recognize Wada’s world in the first few seconds of a film. Curated and presented by Markus Nornes.

Films in Competition 14
9:15 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Recent experimental, documentary, and animated films: The Divine Way (La Via Divina) (Ilaria Di Carlo), Hallowstide (Steve Socki), Never Never Land (Michael Fleming), Leafcutters (Catherine Chalmers), Xvideo (Miss Free Collective), Please Come Again (Alisa Yang), Failing Up (Jacqueline Gross), At the Horizon (Manuel Knapp and Makino Takashi).

Afterparty
11:00pm - 2:00am | Circ Bar | $5, Free with AAFF Pass
Featuring a performance of Library Music by microluv (aka Jared Van Eck) and performance with visuals by Camilo Gonzalez.

For tickets to the Ann Arbor Film Fest, click here for individual events; for full or weekend passes, click here. Use code AAFF57_AADL to get a discount on tickets and passes. Visit aafilmfest.org for more info.
Trailers for: March 26 | March 27 | March 28 | March 29 | March 31
Click here for the landing page for our 57th Ann Arbor Film Festival.