Blog Post
AAFF 2017 | A Guide to the 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival
by christopherporter
When the Ann Arbor Film Festival (AAFF) put together the printed edition of its 2017 program, the organization did it the usual way: listing the dates and the movies underneath. Throw in the "Off the Screen" events and after parties, et voila: the program calendar for the 55th edition of this Ann Arbor mainstay.
But when AAFF was putting together its website, the staff noticed a theme -- or several.
"We did set the [film] programs first," said Executive Director Leslie Raymond to Pulp in this recent interview. "Later when we looked back at them, we recognized some recurring themes and some things people would be interested in that we could pull together -- a few different film programs. People have told us that it's great and it can really help them to figure out what they want to do at the festival."
It made a lot of sense to us, too. Film festivals often group their movies by themes, which helps viewers hone in on their primary interests rather than root through a calendar to see what movies match their tastes on a specific day.
With Raymond's guidance, we identified the 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival's major film tracks as listed on its website, reviewed the primary movies or collections within them, and previewed the rest of the screenings or events in the series. Below is a list of our theme-based coverage for AAFF 2017:
➥ Amazing Stories: "Following Seas" & more
➥ Asian Focus: "Axes of Dwelling: The Video Art of Yuan Goangming" & more
➥ Music Focus: "Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present" & more
➥ New Media: "Post-Internet and the Moving Image" & more
➥ Political: "Socrates of Kamchatka" & more
➥ Totally Out There/Classic AAFF: "The Pink Egg" & more
For the film tracks we weren't able to get to, we put together a post with trailers, showtimes, and links to descriptions:
➥ All Ages, Animation, Black Diaspora, Globalization, LGBTQ & Sci-Fi
The Ann Arbor District Library has partnered with AAFF for the "Films in Competition 8: Almost All Ages" program on Saturday, March 25 at 11am in the main auditorium of the Michigan Theater. You can get a discount on your ticket by entering AAFF55_AADL.
Also, visit AAFF's website for a full list of the film festival's free "Off the Screen" events, which includes workshops, receptions, and more.
We also have recap coverage planned for:
➥ "The New Negress Film Society: I Am a Negress of Noteworthy Talent" discussion and screenings. (March 24, 5:10 pm, free | Michigan Theater)
➥ An overall wrap-up from a nearly 20-year resident of the region who has never been to the festival but will immerse herself in it this year.
There's also a slew of after parties:
➥ Tuesday, March 21: Sava's, 16 S. State St. | 10 pm - 12 am, free
➥ Wednesday, March 22: The Raven's Club, 207 S. Main St. "> 11 pm - 1 am, free
➥ Thursday, March 23: \aut\ Bar, 315 Braun Ct. | 11 pm - 2 am, free
➥ Friday, March 24: The Ann Arbor Distilling Company, 220 Felch St. | 10 pm - 2 am, $5 or free with AAFF Pass. Expanded cinema performance of "Drone" by Osman Khan, associate professor at U-M's School of Art & Design.
➥ Saturday, March 25: Club Above, 215 N. Main St. | 10 pm - 2 am, $8 or free with AAFF Pass. Expanded cinema performance by Matilda Techno Collective and DJ Chad Pratt (Midwest Product).
➥ Sunday, March 26: The Ann Arbor Distilling Company, 220 Felch St. | 8 pm - 12 am, $5 or free with AAFF Pass. Expanded cinema performance by TriO.
Finally, if you have limited time, you could just peek at the best of the best of AAFF 55 during the two juried awards ceremonies at the Michigan Theater on the last day of the festival, Sunday, March 26: "Awards 1" (5 pm) and "Awards 2" (7 pm).
Christopher Porter is a Library Technician and editor of Pulp.
Blog Post
AAFF 2017 | Amazing Stories: "Following Seas" & more
by christopherporter
Following Seas
Amazing Stories | Features in Competition
My dad often bemoans the lack of color in today’s movies. Back in the day, he says, the colors were more vibrant and jumped out at you from the screen. The reds were deeper, the yellows brighter, and the blues like the color of the ocean. If Dad was not in Florida enjoying a well-deserved retirement, I would insist that he come to the screening of Following Seas. Filmed by the Griffith family on their epic around the world adventures in the '60s and '70s, the ocean blue smacks you in the face and you are happy to let it do so.
Bob and Nancy Griffith met while on their respective boats in Honolulu Harbor. A successful veterinarian, Bob retired early to fulfill a lifelong dream of sailing the world. He and Nancy fell in love, married, and set out on the adventure of a lifetime all the while shooting film and still pictures to document their travels.
The Following Seas documentary by Tyler Kelley and Araby Williams highlights the family's voyages with their young child on the Ahwahnee boat.
While the vessel was sturdy and well maintained, the living conditions on land lacked modern amenities. For instance, upon arriving at an island, the family alit from their boat, put up a covering and slept right on the beach. They fished for their food or relied on the supplies they brought with them. While this may seem primitive, Nancy Griffith reported, “You aren’t deprived of anything necessary, so you are comfortable.”
In the midst of these happy sails, the Griffiths had another child and decided to leave America for the wild seas. Whilst enjoying this nomadic lifestyle, the first Awanhee boat was wrecked. Completely undaunted, the family got its entire savings of $8,000, took the engine and sail from the first boat and constructed a new boat that was also called Awahnee. The 53-foot boat had the same design as the original boat and construction took a little under a year. The family set sail again, ultimately completing 20 ocean voyages, circumnavigating the Earth in 1963, 1966, and 1971.
This incredible documentary includes scenes from these adventures as captured by the family’s 16mm camera. One of the most striking was their expedition to Antarctica, in which the Griffiths left their six-month-old baby with grandparents, and set sail with their 14-year-old son and three New Zealanders. From New Zealand, they sailed to the Campbell Island about 350 miles south. They did not have complete charts for that far south and had to figure out the navigation by hand -- without GPS or any other modern convenience of the 21st century.
Again, the photography is absolutely stunning. Dark green icebergs stick out of the deep blue water. Land masses are so white that they hurt your eyes greet the Griffiths and their crew. At some point, National Geographic met them to take photographs.
While sailing between the mainland and the islands, the family and crew visited various stations all maintained by different countries. In each case, they were greeted as celebrities and heroes, Nancy Griffith said. They had dinner and drinks with their hosts and were able to communicate regardless of language because, as Bob Griffith said, “You don’t have to have the same language to talk about boats and weather.”
More adventures awaited the Awahnee crew as they sailed back toward Hawaii, and the overarching sense of absolute freedom and exhilaration never leaves us. Perhaps without meaning to, Nancy summed up the movie perfectly when she recalled the return journey as the “sensation of being on top of the world.” March 25, 5:15 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium (Theater members will be admitted for free; documentarians Tyler Kelley and Araby Williams in attendance.)
More Amazing Stories:
LUIS & I
Opening Night Screening | Amazing Stories |Shorts in Competition
How many of us would shoot ourselves out of a cannon for a living? How many of us would abandon our dreams of becoming an actress to work with a traveling circus because we wanted to stay with that human cannonball? Such is the premise for the short film Luis & I. The trailers show a man flying through the air like a majestic eagle—but without the wings and with the hope that he will land in the net. March 21, 8:15pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium (filmmakers in attendance)
Socrates of Kamchatka
Political | Amazing Stories | World Premiere
For our full review of this movie, click here. March 22, 7:30 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
Furusato 古里
Furusato | Globalization | Amazing Stories | Asian Focus | Features in Competition
The idea is that everyone in Japan is supposed to love their hometowns -- their furusato. Ideally, this concept conjures images of multiple generations living in rural towns in quaint abodes. But what does that mean in Fukushima five years after the biggest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl? This feature-length documentary by Thorsten Trimpop (who will be in attendance) follows four residents of Fukushima: an activist, an engineer, a horse breeder and a teenager. They have lost homes and land, live with the threat of radiation, and spend their lives in a place known as a “nuclear exclusion zone.” What does it mean when your furusato—the first place you see as a child and the last place you should see before you pass on—is the place where the local nuclear power plant melted down? The documentary examines modern living and progress set against the backdrop of a rural village that was irrevocably changed five years ago. March 26, 2:15 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Patti Smith is a special education teacher and writer who lives in Ann Arbor with her husband and cat.
➥ Return to "AAFF 2017 | A Guide to the 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival" for a full list of our coverage.
Blog Post
AAFF 2017 | Asian Focus: "Axes of Dwelling: The Video Art of Yuan Goangming" & more
by christopherporter
"Axes of Dwelling: The Video Art of Yuan Goangming"
Asian Focus | New Media | Short Films
We've all seen countless homes, city streets, and natural landscapes in our lifetimes -- but never seen them quite the way Yuan Goangming does. The Taiwanese video artist's work is full of such commonplace imagery, but through innovative presentation and perspective, Yuan imbues familiar sights with surprising new feelings of both wonderment and unease. A wide variety of his works will be shown during the career retrospective "Axes of Dwelling," for which Yuan will appear and participate in a discussion with University of Michigan professor of Asian cinema Markus Nornes.
Take for example Yuan's 2011 short work Disappearing Landscape: Passing II. The piece features three channels of video, previously presented as a room-scale gallery installation but shown at AAFF in a single channel. Yuan mounted three cameras adjacent each other and filmed simultaneously as he tracked through various scenes, including multiple homes (some pristine, some dilapidated), a forest, and city streets. The final effect is a nearly 270-degree view of each setting, not unlike the 360-degree videos that have proliferated online since Yuan created the work, but also presenting the viewer with much greater perspective and sense of momentum. Yuan writes that the film was inspired by his father's death, his child's birth, and having built his own home "on ruins," and it's easy to feel and relate to the awe and melancholy that accompanies these wide-open, well-observed vistas.
Similar themes are present in Yuan's 2014 work Dwelling. The single-shot film displays a lovely, sunlit, attractively decorated room with a newspaper standing up improbably on its own centerfold as a gentle breeze ruffles its pages. Then, suddenly, several explosive charges go off and the contents of the room shatter upward in slow-motion detail. As the explosion reaches its peak, the video runs back and the fragments of the room reassemble themselves into their original order. Yuan addressed the piece in a 2015 interview. "From one perspective, it means destruction," he said. "From another, it can also represent rebirth."
Not all Yuan's works tackle such hefty themes. His 1998 installation The Reason for Insomnia featured a bed, bare except for a pillow motorized to rise and fall, emulating a breathing sleeper. A video projector controlled by a knob on the bedframe casts unsettling images that take on a disturbingly lifelike quality when thrown against the white bed sheet. A slit slowly appears in the sheet in one projection; in another, a mysterious bump crawls slowly beneath the sheet from the foot to the head of the bed; in another, the bed appears to catch fire.
The title of AAFF's retrospective is apt because dwellings and the nature of the spaces humans fill (or vacate) are clear preoccupations for Yuan. But the concept of the axis is key as well. Many of Yuan's works revolve around a distinct physical axis -- as in Disappearing Landscape, or his 1995 work The Cage, in which a fixed camera looks directly up through the bottom of a birdcage while someone carries it. But even outside his works containing unconventional visual perspectives, Yuan also consistently reorients the viewer's axis in the more general sense of an agreed-upon reference point. He has a playful sense of how the world turns, and he encourages us to rethink our own preconceived notions and play along with him. (You can also see his 2014 installation film Indication at the Ann Arbor Art Center.) March 25, 9:15 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
More Asian Focus films:
The River
Films in Competition 3 | Asian Focus | Shorts in Competition
In this Taiwanese short, which will screen as part of AAFF's "Short Films in Competition 3" program, director Ya-Ting Hsu explores the idea of pregnancy as a traumatic, recurring, intergenerational experience. The film is inspired by Hsu's own pregnancy. Hsu's co-director Geoffrey Hughes will be in attendance for this screening. March 22, 7:15 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
A Page of Madness
Special Program | Asian Focus | Music
This 1926 Japanese silent avant-garde film following the story of a janitor in an asylum was lost for 45 years before director Teinosuke Kinugasa rediscovered it in his own storehouse. Kataoka Ichiro will fill the traditional Japanese role of benshi for this screening, providing live narration for the film, while local tiny-instrument trio Little Bang Theory provides musical accompaniment. March 22, 9:30 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Commodity City
Films in Competition 5 | Asian Focus | Shorts in Competition
Director Jessica Kingdon will be in attendance for this screening of her short film about vendors who work in China's Yiwu market, also known as China Commodity City, the largest wholesale market on the planet. Kingdon focuses on the relationship between commercial goods and those who sell them. March 24, 9:30 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Mein Hutong
Films in Competition 9 | Asian Focus | Shorts in Competition
The blend of languages in this film's title expresses the cultural push and pull in Jie Jie Ng's work. Although he is of Chinese heritage, the director lives in Germany and has never resided in China. The film focuses on his fascination with Beijing's hutongs, or alleys, many of which have a rich cultural history despite being increasingly demolished in favor of new development. March 25, 12:45 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
"Video Bureau: Selections From an Archive in China"
Filmmaker Ellen Zweig curated and will present this program of short works collected by Video Bureau, a Chinese artists' nonprofit dedicated to archiving and exhibiting video art. The films range from a performance piece featuring a literal human chameleon to a documentary in which a filmmaker returns to his childhood home to explore the lives of coal miners. March 25, 2:45 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
Furusato 古里
Amazing Stories | Asian Focus | Features in Competition
Director Thorsten Trimpop will be in attendance for the North American premiere of this heartbreaking film about a village that fell partly within the evacuation zone for the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Residents have been allowed to return, but as Trimpop shows, their lives are anything but back to normal. March 26, 2:15 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
Patrick Dunn is an Ann Arbor-based freelance writer and the managing editor of Concentrate.
➥ Return to "AAFF 2017 | A Guide to the 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival" for a full list of our coverage.
Blog Post
AAFF 2017 | Music Focus: "Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present" & more
by christopherporter
Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present
Feature in Competition | Music
For a man who was a paragon for expanding the paradigms of what constitutes art, music, and film, the subject of Tyler Hubby’s documentary Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present looks like any other rumpled khakis-and-button-down-shirt-wearing older professor. But when Conrad opens his mouth and the words begin to tumble out, his flowing imagination, sense of mischief, and singular view of the world make him anything but a tenured bore.
After graduating with a degree in mathematics from Harvard in 1962 and working as a computer programmer for a year, Conrad spent the rest of his life rebelling against anything as structured as those disciplines.
“He’s definitely got issues with authority,” says Tony Oursler, an artist and frequent Conrad collaborator.
In 1964, Conrad became a member of the pioneering group Theatre of Eternal Music, aka The Dream Syndicate. “I think one of the accomplishments of the group I worked with,” Conrad says in the film, “with John Cale and La Monte Young and Angus Maclise and Marian Zazeela was the inauguration of a minimal sensibility in music.”
“It was this very reductive process where they’d just settle on a few microtonal intervals,” says Jeff Hunt of the Table of the Elements record label in the film. “They’re playing very precise pitches for a very, very long time. It’s physically grueling.”
But soon after the group disbanded, Conrad turned his attention to experimental film, the more aleatory the better. “This logic was not recognizable to audiences,” Conrad says in the doc about his fractured narratives, “and I thought, ‘Excellent! Good.’” He would go on to film himself cooking film, and eventually reduced the definition of “film” to anything you’d see in front of you. For instance, Conrad would paint a yellow square and call it a film.
“I don’t think he’s an easy artist to take,” Oursler says in the movie. “He’s done a lot of stuff against the grain.”
Even his closest pals didn’t always understand Conrad’s quirky contradictions, which were as much about eliciting a reaction as they were about creating a finished document. He spent one period painting corkboard with underwear pinned to it to address aging issues, such as incontinence. His art friends were aghast; Conrad was delighted with their reaction.
After leaving Theatre of Eternal Music, Conrad rarely made music for the next two decades. He spent his time making art and movies as well as teaching media at the University of New York - Buffalo, a fertile ground for the avant-garde in the 1970s and '80s. It wasn’t until Table of the Elements reintroduced Conrad’s mostly forgotten music to the public that his genius could be heard by a wider audience with the label’s 1993 release of 1973’s Outside the Dream Syndicate, an album made with krautrock icons Faust.
“The drones that he would create, I found them to be very calming,” says musician Moby in the movie. “Like, you could feel your metabolism sort of sinking and slowing down in a really nice way.”
Table of the Elements also released a 1964 recording called Four Violins (1996), which is one of the few tapes Conrad had from his Eternal Music days. It features Conrad overdubbing himself with four violins to create a discordant drone that was later heard in The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin,” courtesy his old bandmate and VU co-founder John Cale.
Otherwise, Young recorded all the Dream Syndicate’s practices and performances between 1963-65 and refused to release anything, leaving this music to the dustbin of history until courts said all the members were equal owners. In 2000, Table of the Elements released the CD Inside the Dream Syndicate, Volume I: Day of Niagara (1965). That album and Four Violins helped rewrite modern music history and Conrad’s central place in it.
Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present does a wonderful job of not only tracing Conrad’s influence on the avant-garde, it also shows him to be witty, playful, provocative, and funny into his 70s. At one point in the film, Conrad is standing on a sidewalk, and later in the middle of an intersection, directing a piece of “music” by calling out the cars and trucks that are about to fly, acting like a conductor does when it's time for the violins to rush in. “Now I need a truck -- there it is! ... No, I didn’t ask for a motorcycle!”
Conrad died April 9, 2016, age 76, and this documentary is a meaningful memorial to a man who, to the end, lived up to this quote in the film: “I resisted all ideas of professionalism.” March 26, 12:00pm "> Michigan Theater Screening Room
More Music films:
A Page of Madness
Special Program | Asian Focus | Music
Silent movies in America were accompanied by live music, but they relied on the film’s intertitle cards to convey dialogue and plot developments. But in Japan, silent movies were shown alongside a benshi, a performer versed in the kabuki and Noh theater traditions, who would voice dialogue, read the intertitle cards (if there were any), and made comments about the on-screen action. Tonight’s screening of Teinosuke Kinugasa’s 1926 avant-garde film about a janitor in an insane asylum will feature benshi Kataoka Ichiro with live music by Little Bang Theory, the Detroit trio that specializes in silent-movie accompaniment using toy and tiny instruments. March 22, 9:30pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Short Films in Competition 11: Music Videos
Shorts Program | Music
Compared to MTV’s heyday, music videos have lost their elite status in pop culture. But they are still regular parts of promoting a musician’s vision thanks to the internet, and videos have continued to be vital art forms even if they’re not shown on TV much anymore. Long-time concert promoter Greg Baise curated the 18 videos here, which run the gamut from Lightning Bolt’s animated headbanger “The Metal East” (directed by Lale Westvind) to director David Chontos’s short film “Sisters,” whose b&w dreamscape is soundtracked by the bleak electronica of Fever Ray. March 25, 7:00pm | Lorch Hall
Christopher Porter is a Library Technician and editor of Pulp.
➥ Return to "AAFF 2017 | A Guide to the 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival" for a full list of our coverage.
Blog Post
AAFF 2017 | New Media: "Post-Internet and the Moving Image" & more
by christopherporter
"Post-Internet and the Moving Image"
New Media "> Shorts Program
"Film was the medium of the 20th century," video artist Jaakko Pallasvuo somberly intones in voiceover in his short video Bergman. "Film is radio. Film is painting. Film is a drawing on sand, about to be swept away by the ocean."
The descriptor "video artist" is used pointedly here, rather than "filmmaker," because Pallasvuo makes that distinction quite clearly himself in Bergman. Pallasvuo's short essay on the great director Ingmar Bergman juxtaposes brief clips of Bergman's films with recognizable icons of the internet age, like the Gmail and PayPal logos. Pallasvuo drily asks: "Do all video artists fantasize about becoming directors? It's a fantasy about traveling in time."
In Andrew Rosinski's curated program "Post-Internet and the Moving Image," Bergman is just one of 13 offerings that are ostensibly short films but assert themselves as something other in their embrace of technology. Rosinski characterizes the program as an attempt to define the nascent genre of "post-internet cinema," noting that most of his selections were created to be viewed online, not in a movie theater.
And yet many of them certainly still benefit from viewing on a large screen. Take for example the lovely short Stream, which opens Rosinski's program. Artist Joe Hamilton compiles countless still and moving images of water into a constantly changing collage, forming images that suggest babbling brooks as well as scrolling web pages and loading online videos. Hamilton playfully blends references to the internet-age definition of the word "stream" with references to the bodies of water the word originally denoted. The beauty of his constantly shifting imagery is undeniable, and Hamilton even mines his concept for a little humor when the video stutters to "buffer" for a moment.
Similarly, Emilio.jp's short Opening Folders draws remarkable beauty from one of the most banal elements of the technological age. Screen-captured video shows the artist selecting and then opening a series of 50 folders on his computer desktop in various orders, a concept that at face value sounds potentially even less interesting than watching paint dry. But each of those folders contains a vibrantly colorful image file, with gradients arranged differently so that the images create roughly animated undulating patterns as they open and close. It's CGI, but rather than trying to create something sleeker and more realistic than the latest big-budget movie, Emilio.jp embraces the beauty inherent in the most basic functions of our most commonplace technology.
Not all the selections in Rosinski's program embrace the beauty of technology. Andrew Norman Wilson's Workers Leaving the Googleplex features Wilson's disheartening tale of his repeatedly thwarted attempts to chronicle the second-class Google employees -- mostly people of color -- who scan pages for Google Books. Darja Bajagić's Tanya versus Irena comments on the ubiquity of online pornography by presenting a lazily paced, discomfortingly distorted series of images of the same two women disrobing.
But true artistry pervades the selections in Rosinski's program -- artistry that wouldn't work without technology, and that wouldn't work as well in any format but the often-ghettoized internet video. "Film would be perfect," Pallasvuo sighs in Bergman, while also admitting that he'd be "mediocre at every individual aspect of making a film." He and the other artists featured in "Post-Internet and the Moving Image" have excelled at something else entirely. March 22, 5:00 pm "> Michigan Theater Screening Room
More New Media films:
External Memory
Opening Night Screening "> Short Films in Competition 1 "> New Media "> Shorts in Competition
Filmmaker Yuan Zheng says this short tells the story of "a man who visits a place without ever going there," rendered in rough, colorful computer-generated imagery. The film will make its world premiere at AAFF. March 21, 8:15 pm "> Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
"Short Films in Competition 7: Animation"
New Media "> Shorts Program "> Animation
AAFF's animation programs always offer a lively variety of films, and this year appears to be no exception. New media will be represented in films including Artificial Intelligence for Governance: AI the Kitty, a computer-animated tale of an artificial intelligence with the appearance of a cat who becomes a government official in the year 2039. March 24, 9:30 pm "> Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
New Media "> Friday After Party
U-M professor and artist Osman Khan's live performance Drone is a singularly inventive example of AAFF's increasing embrace of "expanded cinema" -- immersive cinematic experiences that reject the traditional model of sitting in a theater, watching a single screen. Drone blends pre-recorded drone footage taken in a variety of situations with drone video recorded live during the performance. Live musical accompaniment will play off another sense of the word "drone." March 24, 10:00 pm "> Ann Arbor Distilling Company
Axes of Dwelling: The Video Art of Yuan Guangming
For our full review of this event, click here. March 25, 9:15 pm "> Michigan Theater Screening Room
Patrick Dunn is an Ann Arbor-based freelance writer and the managing editor of Concentrate.
➥ Return to "AAFF 2017 "> A Guide to the 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival" for a full list of our coverage.
Blog Post
AAFF 2017 | Political: "Socrates of Kamchatka" & more
by christopherporter
Socrates of Kamchatka
Political | Amazing Stories | World Premiere
The first thing that strikes you as you enter the world of Socrates of Kamchatka is that your experience is being intermediated by the whimsical soliloquy of its titular world-weary horse. This gives the film a fable-like sheen and makes the central dramatic arc -- a rural community’s struggle to adapt to unceasing waves of national economic and political change -- at once both familiar and strange.
Socrates is no mincer of words, and he tells his story with deft aplomb, fully realizing the benefits of his equine perspective on human happenings and behavior. “Mother always bit my thighs for asking questions,” our narrator confides, before adding, “But then why name me Socrates?”
Each decade of Socrates’ tale is represented as an -ism and portrayed not simply as a unit of time but as a distinct locality. Hence, we see our human protagonist, Anfisa Brazaluk, move from the bucolic pleasures of the village of socialism to the centrally planned cement town of communism, and on through the fields of capitalism before finally settling in the otherworldly town of tourism. Along the way, the bonds between people and horses progressively fray to the point of tearing asunder, culminating in a stark, fatal winter with bleak consequences for community members of both species. It is in the aftermath of this pain and darkness that Anfisa hatches a plan to make her Kamchatkan hometown a destination for tourists eager to experience the very same bucolic pleasures everyone had left behind decades before.
Through a combination of traditional interviews, political speeches, home movies, and artful reenactments, all sewn together by Socrates’ probing narration, filmmaker Irina Patkanian (who will in attendance at this screening) delivers a compelling and compassionate inquiry into the consequences of entrusting ourselves to the care of others. By telling the story in Socrates’ voice, Patkanian engages human life on animal terms, reminding us how little separates these two worlds.
Although much of the film is viewed through the thin gauze of history, it steps closer to the keen edge of current events in its concluding moments as it documents the local Kamchatkan reaction to Putin’s return to the office of President of Russia in 2012. This brief window into contemporary Russian politics is made all the more potent by the clip that precedes it, a haunting allegorical yarn about breaking the spirits of wild stallions. This is, after all, the story of a horse, albeit one given to clear-eyed philosophical musings. March 22, 7:30 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
More Political Films:
A Prerequisite for Rebellion
Political | Shorts Program | Black Diaspora
A Prerequisite for Rebellion is a cycle of seven short films (including the above's The Vacuum Is Too Loud) curated by Detroit-based cultural producer and AFROTOPIA founder Ingrid LaFleur that frames the physical and emotional trauma the black body is subjugated to in colonized space. This constellation of films explores the manifestations of this trauma as well as efforts to engage in the disruption and systematic deconstruction of white supremacy. March 24, 9:15 pm "> Michigan Theater Screening Room
AAFF v. State of Michigan: Ten Years Later
Political | Panel DiscussionFormer AAFF executive director and artist Christen Lien (above) and award-winning filmmaker and essayist dream hampton will join Michigan ACLU legal director Michael J. Steinberg in a panel conversation to mark the 10-year anniversary of the landmark First Amendment case that AAFF won to protect artistic expression from the chilling effects of censorship. March 25, 11:30 am, free | North Quad Space 2435
ACTS & INTERMISSIONS
Political | Features in Competition
A new feature documentary by Abigail Child, ACTS & INTERMISSIONS uses the life, writings and ideas of anarchist, lecturer, and revolutionary Emma Goldman to anchor an investigation into the tensions between personal freedom and risk, labor and ownership, dogmatism and compromise. Deftly and freely weaving together footage and audio from Goldman’s life with historical as well as contemporary images, this film brings the questions that drove her work and advocacy to bear on our own fraught cultural moment. March 25, 12:30 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
America for Americans
Political | Films in Competition 9 | Black Diaspora | World Premiere
This film collage by Blair McClendon pulls together found footage of the grief, pain, joy, resistance and injustice that permeate contemporary Black life on the precipice, drawing on the voices of artists, victims and bystanders alike in the process. As the AAFF description asserts, “It is the presentation of a siege.” March 25, 12:45 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Nicco Pandolfi is an Ann Arbor-based freelance writer and a Public Library Associate at AADL.
➥ Return to "AAFF 2017" A Guide to the 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival" for a full list of our coverage.
Blog Post
AAFF 2017 | Totally Out There/Classic AAFF: "The Pink Egg" & more
by christopherporter
The Pink Egg
Features in Competition | Totally Out There | Classic AAFF
If you're going to make a film that fits the aesthetic of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Luis Bunuel makes for a near-perfect starting point. Director Jim Trainor begins The Pink Egg with a quote from the celebrated surrealist: "You can find all of Shakespeare and De Sade in the lives of insects." That sentence offers a pithy declaration of artistic intent, and Trainor follows through, offering viewers a one-of-a-kind evocation of the animal world.
Employing boldly minimalistic and colorful sets that could double for an unhinged, low-budget children's program, Trainor casts humans clad in long-sleeved, hooded unitards to act out the mating rituals, lifecycles, and surprisingly human experiences of various wasps, bees, and insects. Alternately humorous, tragic, and inspiring, The Pink Egg remains a defiantly uncommercial picture due to the lack of dialogue, and the seemingly bizarre actions of the nameless characters. You may find yourself asking why some of the female characters paint pink and blue tubes with lotion, meant to represent seminal fluid, and why those tubes suddenly change color.
While watching Trainor's idiosyncratic approach, there are some previous works that come to mind. Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno series makes an obvious antecedent, but where that program focused specifically on the sexual habits of various animals, Trainor goes deeper. Rossellini wanted to educate, but Trainor would rather engage emotionally. Having worked primarily as an animator, Trainor breaks away from that discipline here by having people embody animals we usually disregard as pests. Projecting yourself into these creatures' lives becomes easier with a human face attached to them. Because of that artistic choice, viewers connect directly when the characters escape predators, protect their offspring, and find the right mate. Their goals and obstacles become more relatable, and so you feel a greater affinity for these animals. Just try not remembering how exhausting the life of a worker bee is the next time you swat one away.
The end credits provide a bibliography of nonfiction texts that Trainor, who also credits himself as "researcher," absorbed while prepping this ambitious project. That said, The Pink Egg is not a documentary. While it's true that the movie needs only a traditional David Attenborough voiceover explaining what you are watching, and the removal of some brief nudity, to make it palatable to a wider audience, making those adjustments would rob the film of its artistic merit. The Pink Egg does not preach, but it demands viewers make sense of what they are seeing on their own terms before researching the facts.
Considering the film's unconventional look, liberal use of fast-motion, and lack of exposition, Trainor deserves much credit for working up as much empathy as he does for his subjects. His intellectual cinematic approach utilizes purposefully distancing film techniques: all the sound has been added in post, the songs recall the ones in David Lynch's Eraserhead, and the special effects throw off your sense of scale. The overall effect occasionally recalls the work of director Shane Carruth, particularly the second half of Upstream Color, another movie that drew parallels between humans and animals.
One would be hard-pressed to think of a more perfect film to play at the Totally Out There/Classic AFF track than this, which is also making its world premiere. The only irony is that Trainor, who has made animals the center of much of his work, shows us what is "out there" may be more like us than we ever considered. March 22, 9:15 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
More Totally Out There/Classic AAFF films:
100 Years of Dada: Dada in Dialogue With the Present
Shorts Program | Totally Out There | Classic AAFF
Dada is one of those artistic movements that everybody feels comfortable referencing, but few people genuinely understand. Although that seems fitting for a style devoted to upending not just conventional concepts of art, but the belief that anything can be understood at all. This collection of eight shorts, culled from between 1924 and 2014, showcases how the Dada movement evolved over time, and features works from recognized masters like René Clair and Marcel Duchamp alongside projects from newer names like Mónica Savirón and Mirai Mizue. March 23, 7:30 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Pat Oleszko, live and in person
Shorts Program | Totally Out There | Classic AAFF
A performance artist comfortable in a variety of media, Pat Oleszko delivers a unique live experience followed by a half-dozen avant-garde shorts (included in "Films in Competition 6") including one from the University of Michigan's own Terri Sarris. March 24, 7 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Bliss
Shorts Program | Totally Out There | Classic AAFF
Directors Sofia Caetano, who will be in attendance when her film screens, and Elliot Sheedy have crafted a sci-fi religious-tinged comedy (included in "Films in Competition 6") about a god-like figure who sends a pair of teenagers into the Garden of Eden with a way to achieve the title condition. March 24, 7 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Kuro
Totally Out There | Classic AAFF
According to directors Joji Koyama and Tujiko Noriko, Kuro examines how the stories we use to make sense of our lives are not always under our control. The film centers on a woman who entertains her paraplegic boyfriend by making up outlandish stories based on incidents from their shared past. March 25, 5 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
ELONA EM EVAEL/LEAVE ME ALONE
Totally Out There | Classic AAFF | Shorts in Competition
Loosely inspired by the 1926 Man Ray film Emak Bakia, Kathryn Ramey's ELONA EM EVAEL/LEAVE ME ALONE (included in "Films in Competition 13") utilizes unconventional techniques -- she created the five-minute work without a motion picture camera -- to juxtapose the everyday lives of people in stable countries with victims of military actions performed by the armed forces of those same countries. March 25, 9:30 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Perry Seibert is a movie lover, freelance writer, and founding member of the Detroit Film Critics Society. Follow him on twitter @Perrylovesfilm.
➥ Return to "AAFF 2017 | A Guide to the 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival" for a full list of our coverage.
Blog Post
AAFF 2017 | All Ages, Animation, Black Diaspora, Globalization, LGBTQ & Sci-Fi
by christopherporter
ALL AGES
"Short Films in Competition 8: Almost All Ages (Ages 6+)
Shorts Program | All Ages
March 25, 11:00am | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Cranky Shows: Low-Tech, High Entertainment Paper Theatre
Off the Screen! | All Ages
March 25, 1:00pm | North Quad Space 2435
ANIMATION
Short Films in Competition 7: Animation
Shorts Program | New Media | Animation
March 24, 9:30 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
BLACK DIASPORA
"The New Negress Film Society: I Am a Negress of Noteworthy Talent"
Special Program, Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series
March 23, 5:10 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
A Prerequisite for Rebellion
Special Program curated and presented by Ingrid LaFleur
March 24, 9:15 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
America for Americans
World Premiere, included in short Films in Competition 9, with director Blair McClendon in attendance
March 25, 12:45pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
GLOBALIZATION
Modern Jungle
Feature in Competition, filmmakers by Charles Fairbanks and Saul Kak in attendance
March 24, 5:00pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
Hotel Dallas
Feature in Competition
March 26, 12:15pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Furusato 古里
North American Premiere, Feature in Competition, director Thorsten Trimpop in attendance
March 26, 2:15 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
LGBTQ
"Short Films in Competition 4: Out Night"
March 23, 7:00 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
Deux Femmes (For Man Ray)
World Premiere, Feature in Competition, director Ann Oren in attendance
March 23, 9:15 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
SCI-FI
Voyage of the Galactic Space Dangler
Included in short Films in Competition 3
March 22, 7:15 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
BLISS
North American Premiere, included in short Films in Competition 6, director Sofia Caetano and score composer Elliot Sheedy in attendance
March 24, 7:00pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Artificial Intelligence for Governance: AI the Kitty
Included in short Films in Competition 12
March 25, 7:15pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Christopher Porter is a Library Technician and editor of Pulp.
➥ Return to "AAFF 2017 | A Guide to the 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival" for a full list of our coverage.
Blog Post
AAFF 2017 | Interview with Leslie Raymond, Executive Director
by christopherporter
The 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival gets underway Tuesday, March 21, and as artists and film lovers from around the globe prepare to descend upon the Michigan Theater for six days of mind-expanding cinema, Executive Director Leslie Raymond is on a mission to take the country's longest-running avant-garde and experimental film festival back to its all-inclusive roots.
Founded by George Manupelli in 1963, the AAFF has seen its share of shake-ups over the course of the past decade. From the AAFF v. State of Michigan lawsuit that resulted in part from the controversy that erupted over Crispin Glover's award-winning 2005 feature What Is It? to the departure of Program Director David Dinnell last year, Raymond no-doubt had her work cut out for her when she stepped into this pivotal role.
Fortunately for filmmakers and audiences alike, Raymond was no stranger to either the festival or Manupelli's original vision for it as a place where all voices and perspectives are celebrated. Twenty-five years ago, Raymond began her decades-long relationship with the AAFF as an intern under Program Director Vicki Honeyman, whose enduring 14-year run with the festival was longest anyone has served in such capacity other than the founder.
To take the reigns of a festival as celebrated and prestigious as the AAFF requires genuine dedication, and as anyone familiar with Raymond's impassioned 2009 blog post lamenting the "specialized, themed-programming" that had become a primary focus of the festival during that era, there was little question as to where her loyalties lied.
Flash forward eight years, and Raymond is now in the unique position of being able to turn those criticisms into concrete action. Raymond's deep respect for Manupelli's original vision is evident when listening to her speak about her late friend and the festival he conceived, and together with new Associate Director of Programs Katie McGowan, the executive director is on a mission to steer this ship back on course.
With Ann Arbor still recovering from the devastating windstorm dubbed the "largest combined statewide event in history" by Gov. Rick Snyder less than a week before the Opening Night Reception, Raymond was kind enough to take the time out from her hectic schedule to discuss these issues and more with Pulp.
Q: Would you tell us a bit about your background with the festival?
A: This is my fourth Festival as executive director, so the 52nd was my first. I've actually been connected to the festival for a long time. I was an intern 25 years ago when Vicki Honeyman was the director. I've worn so many different hats for the festival: I've shown a couple films in the festival, won a couple of awards, done installation art. At first, it was sort of during the time of the film festival at a local gallery, and then later I started to be invited to do things at the theater, and then I started inviting other artists to do installation work. A lot of storefront window things and after-party installations. I've also arranged programs and screenings, and other special projects, and then I was a screener looking at films back when Vicki was still the director and then eventually when I moved to Texas I was invited to be on the advisory board.
Q: How would you say your new role compares to your older roles?
A: I was an artist and then a teaching artist for many years, so I was never an arts administrator and I was never an executive director before. That is a very different set of glasses to look at things through, so there are a lot of things as an artist or an educator I may have raised an eyebrow at before. Now being the person on the other side, I do a lot of things that I probably would asked myself about when I was younger. I have a much larger understanding and appreciation for what it takes to launch a nonprofit organization. When I first started, Fiat had been a sponsor. I think they had even put a car in the lobby of the Michigan Theater, so one of the first things I was doing was trying to re-engage Fiat to see if they want to do that again. Just that idea of giving over part of the lobby for commercial purposes, as an artist, that's obscene in a lot of ways, but I have a much deeper understanding and appreciation for the need of economic support and how that can be integral and doesn't have to be an obscene thing. I grew up as a DIY punk-rock person so the idea of any kind of sponsorship or any kind of relations with the corporate world was offensive to me. Now that I see from a practical level what it takes here in the states to be able to have such a cool thing like the Ann Arbor Film Festival, I think I've grown up a little bit. In the earlier days, I probably would have called myself a sell-out, but now I'm more adult and more integrated with the ways of the world I guess.
Q: What are some of the challenges you faced this year with the artistic director leaving?
A: We now have Katie McGowan as our associate director of programs, and I would say that one of the things that was exciting to us from the beginning about her stepping forward to be considered in this role was the kind of work she had done with MOCAD. She grew up in Detroit and left for a while to live in California and Eastern Europe and eventually came back and worked at MOCAD and she said she was really surprised at the first function of they had that the whole audience was caucasian. She was just really surprised and she made it kind of a personal mission to help develop and evolve the audience for MOCAD and she had good success. She did things that opened up the program people from the community to be a part of exhibitions and things like that. That was the thing that resonated with what we really wanted to do, which was to help expand, open, and bring more variety, and have more voices involved, and there was a sense that the founding values of the festival were in line with that.
There's a lecture George Manupelli did for the Penny Stamps series. He called it "An Unauthorized History," and he talks about when he first started the film festival. He actually starts by talking about another filmmaker named Jonas Mekas, who was a film curator and he wrote about film, and he was a Lithuanian immigrant filmmaker living in New York and he was sort of at the hub of the avant-garde film scene in New York then. He did a lot to nurture and grow the community, but as George put it, "If he liked your films, he showed them; and if he didn't, he didn't." George envisioned a different kind of a thing for the Ann Arbor Film Festival. He didn't want it to be a taste-making kind of thing; he really wanted to be open and welcoming and encouraging for everybody to make and submit films and also on the viewing side of things.
Q: So, in a manner of speaking, the new incarnation has come back around to the original intention?
A: Yes, with the caveat that it's my interpretation and understanding through what I've heard George saying, what I've heard others say, and what he and others have written about it. From my own experience of having attended for 25 years, yes, we're trying to bring back some of that original vision of the festival. I think, frankly, what really made it great and what a lot of people responded to was that we have such a great audience here in Ann Arbor and it's unprecedented for an avant-garde film festival to be showing in the 1,700 seat theater. It's hard for us to fill 1,700 seats, but still, our largest audience is a thousand people who will come out for the animation program, which is incredible.
I think some of why we've been successful is because we've been able to take avant-garde and experimental film and put them into a configuration that is attractive to a broad audience. Granted, I'm talking about the broad audience of Ann Arbor for the most part, but we do have a certain type of audience here that's very open-minded and looking for the alternative, and willing to try something different and are seeking something different. We do also have a national and international audience who do come and see the festival, so we do want to remain attractive and in service to them as well.
Q: What do you think it is about the Ann Arbor crowd that makes this particular festival so appealing to them?
A: We're a college town and we have this counterculture history from which the festival sprang from. The values of the counterculture in 1963 was very idealistic and was willing to move into a communally based mindset of operation. It was willing to be inclusive and embrace variety and diversity. It was willing to have its mind expanded and try different things, and experimental film is a great place for mind expansion!
Q: I think more than a few locals were surprised by the SNL parody earlier this year. What was the reaction from the festival organizers?
A: (Laughs) Yeah, that was great! We all loved it! We all saw the humor in it. It was pretty exciting and we've all been trying to find out who wrote it. We were just thrilled that A) it was hilarious and B) it was on Saturday Night Live so those who are in the know about the end of the film festival -- because they didn't call it that, of course, they call the Ann Arbor Short Film Festival -- but it was obviously a parody of us.
Q: How has the 10th anniversary of the Ann Arbor Film Festival versus the State of Michigan lawsuit impacted this year's festival?
A: You noticed in the program that Christen Lien is going to be back here 10 years later. She had been directing the festival for a few years during the lawsuit. She's going to come back and be in conversation with one of the ACLU lawyers she had worked with then. I think that was a really defining moment for her in terms of her leadership of the film festival because it really galvanized something to focus on and rally around. That's something that was very important for the foundation of the film festival and everything that it stands for. In terms of how that has been playing out since she left, we're thrilled that she's coming back and is going to talk about it because, frankly, that story has just kind of quieted down. I don't think we as an organization have held it quite front and center. Now, in the current political climate, is a great time to do that, so I was really excited when she reached out and contacted me and told me that she was working on this current campaign of coming out and telling the story and re-engaging with that work that she did with this 10 years ago.
Q: Would you talk a little bit about the "Off the Screen" events and how you're incorporating the town in the festival?
A: This was an idea that started out last summer. Of course, we've always off-and-on done things that are in storefront windows and try to bring a little extra visibility to the things we do. This year over the summer we had talked about it having some kind of pop-up information stand and ticket booth and maybe we could incorporate an installation with it, and we want to find a way for the film festival to have more of a presence in the weeks leading up, because there are so many people who are here and they don't recognize that it's happening, and then it comes and goes. So we were wondering how we could we call some attention to it. It essentially came out of that. Then the Washtenaw County Community and Economic Development Department gave us an Act 88 mini-grant to do the project.
Q: What are a few of the "Off the Screen" events that the community can look forward to this year?
A: I'm actually heading into the Ann Arbor Art Center right now and we've got a piece in the Aquarium Gallery, which is their window on Ashley, and I'm about to see it for the first time in just a minute. It's one-half of a piece by two artists -- one who teaches at Vanderbilt and the other who is in Turkey. Part of it is down on a monitor in the window and the other part is a video projection on a painting upstairs. My understanding is that it remixes images of contemporary military conflict, so it'll be interesting to see that.
We've also got a piece by Matt Wilkins and Shea Law that's in the storefront window of Arbor Brewing Company and our pop-up ticket booth is in Curtain Call, which is the former Arena. They're letting us use their foyer to hand out information and talk to people and sell tickets and passes. We're about to launch a promotional event to get more people into Curtain Call to try to drive more traffic there in the final week and a half or so before the festival hits.
Then the other piece that's down there is in the 111 South 4th storefront window is by Holly Fisher. She's shown in the festival a few times before. She had a piece called Bullets for Breakfast that won Best Experimental Film in 1992.
Q: What other aspects of the festival should the public know about?
A: Keep an eye out for the different film tracks, the different series. That's something new that we're excited about and getting good feedback about. People are happy to have suggested themes of things to check out. We did set the programs first. Later when we looked back at them, we recognized some recurring themes and some things people would be interested in that we could pull together -- a few different film programs. People have told us that it's great and it can really help them to figure out what they want to do at the festival.
Q: If you were talking to somebody who lives in town but has never attended the film festival, what would you say to encourage them to check it out this year?
A: The festival is a whole lot of fun! It's a great place to go and see alternative media, to hear the voices and stories of a wide variety of people. Not only the stories and the voices but also the way that those stories. It can be a mind-blowing experience, and it's also a really wonderful communal experience. Not only do you have your mind blown but you have it blown with hundreds of other people at the same time so you can then turn to them and compare notes!
Jason Buchanan is a writer and movie fanatic living in Ann Arbor.
➥ Return to "AAFF 2017 " A Guide to the 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival" for a full list of our coverage. For another interview with Leslie Raymond by Pulp contributor Patrick Dunn, check out Concentrate Ann Arbor.
Blog Post
Dreamer & Disrupter: Sophia Kruz uses her films and nonprofit to help women worldwide
by christopherporter
On Wednesday, February 8 at 6 pm, "Dreamers and Disruptors" will invade the University of Michigan campus. That's the theme of this year's TEDxUofM event, which aims to “showcase some of the most fascinating thinkers and doers from the University of Michigan community.” (The event is sold out, but it will be livestreamed for free.)
Sophia Kruz, a filmmaker and Ann Arbor native, is one of this year’s dreamers and disrupters, and she'll give a talk about her new movie, Little Stones. In an email conversation with Pulp, Kruz described the film as "an uplifting story of four women artists in India, Brazil, Senegal, Kenya, Germany, and the U.S. courageously working to end female genital mutilation (FGM), extreme poverty, sex trafficking, and domestic violence through art -- dance, graffiti, fashion, and music."
We talked to the Los Angeles-based Kruz about her project, how it’s changed since the inauguration, her new nonprofit Driftseed, and more.
Q: The theme of TEDxUofM this year is “Dreamers and Disruptors.” Do you think the women whose stories you tell fit that description? How about yourself?
A: Absolutely, these women are dreamers and disruptors! With about 1 billion people living on less than $1 per day, you have to be a dreamer to believe you, as an individual, can make a dent in that issue. Luckily, Anna Taylor, an American fashion designer we profile in Little Stones, has figured out a way to impact the lives of hundreds of women who were living in poverty in Nairobi, Kenya, through her clothing line Judith & James.
Similarly, with an estimated 20 million women and girls trapped in forced prostitution globally, you’d have to be a dreamer to think you could have an impact on enough survivors to move the needle on such a massive issue. Thankfully, Sohini Chakraborty, who we also profile in Little Stones, has found a way to use dance movement therapy to heal thousands of women in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. I find these women’s stories empowering because they are taking on these huge global issues and finding a way to use their own talents to bring about positive change in other women’s lives.
For myself, that’s harder to answer. I think from traveling around the world, talking to individual survivors, women who are using art to create change, and also experts in international development and women’s rights, I’ve had the chance to look closely at these issues from a variety of vantage points. I’m optimistic when thinking about the resilience of survivors and the audacity of the dreamers who believe they can make an impact on the issues -- and actually are! At the same time, I’ve had to confront the scale of these issues, and in some cases, particularly FGM, it was discouraging to hear from women and girls in rural villages in Senegal who didn’t really think it would be possible to eradicate that particular form of violence against women in their communities.
I’m generally a positive person, though, and hope that Little Stones inspires more women and MEN to think outside the box and use their own creativity to come up with solutions to these issues. I also think there are challenges in the way major non-governmental organizations (NGOs, or non-profits) operate globally and would like to see more of these smaller initiatives, like the ones I’ve featured in the film, which are developed primarily by local community leaders, championed in the press, and supported by donors. These smaller initiatives, to me, are able to be disruptive, creative, and scrappy because they are so close to the issue. To get off the ground, they require dreamers to think creatively around restraints (usually financial), but they have the potential to create a major impact on these issues that we’ve been aware of for decades. When there are multiple small, creative projects working simultaneously with different target populations, the cumulative impact will be great, particularly as these ideas begin to scale up. As Sister Fa says when reflecting on global FGM, “Each NGO will tell you that my approach is the best. I think everyone is doing a good job, but it’s still not enough. I think we need to join our power together to eradicate this practice in the very new future, and stop saying my own [approach] is good, and the others are not good.”
Q: I know it is important to you that the team working on the film is women-led. Why?
A: It started as a practical necessity, actually. I knew in certain interviews, like with survivors of FGM in Senegal and sex-trafficking in India, it just wouldn’t be possible to have men in the room. The subject matter is taboo, so getting women to talk about their experiences on camera, I knew we would need all-female interpreters and also a woman cinematographer behind the camera. I wanted the women onscreen to feel comfortable sharing their stories and for our interviews to be a positive, maybe even cathartic experience. At the very least, I didn’t want to retraumatize the women and girls we filmed.
Prior to shooting Little Stones, I had only worked with male cinematographers at PBS and on other projects. That’s actually not so crazy, considering only 3% of cinematographers are women. Eventually, I was connected to Meena Singh, who lives in Los Angeles. At the time, I was based in Ann Arbor, so we met for our first shoot at New York Fashion Week, which was only for a couple days. The next time I saw Meena, she was getting off the plane in Kolkata, and we spent the next three weeks pretty much side by side. Luckily, we hit it off and are now best friends.
We started a nonprofit together, along with Meena’s cousin Ankita Singh, called Driftseed, which will be running the Little Stones outreach and education campaign. This film never would’ve been made without Meena’s support. She kept me sane on the road, donated her camera and her time on shoots when funds were tight, and has championed the project to all the people she knows in Hollywood so we could get it done and out into the world. It’s not that I don’t think a man would’ve been as passionate about this project, because there are also talented men (including my future husband) who believed in Little Stones and lent their skills to help us get it done, but personally, having Meena on every shoot ended up being the key to my ability to do my job as producer/director.
As we moved into the post-production phase and I started hiring more artists to work on the film, it started to become more of a mission to get as many women on the team as possible. I learned that, like cinematographers, on top-grossing films most composers are men -- only 2% are women! -- and that there aren’t nearly enough women editors (only 17%!), so the least I could do was try to hire women.
We also had a small budget and were asking people to work below their normal rate, and women in the film industry totally “got” the project and wanted to help. They made this film great, from Morningstar Schott at Technicolor, who got us in the door for color correction and sound mix at one of the top studios in L.A., to Karoliina Tuovinen, our wonderful editor who helped shape the film and tied each of the four stories into one, to our exceptional composer Amritha Vaz who made it her personal mission to get as many female musicians as possible to record the score -- even on traditionally male-dominated instruments like the kora -- to Rose Jaffe and Dawn Mendelson who designed and created the mosaic for our title animation, and all the young women who worked as volunteers and interns throughout production, post, and now in our outreach campaign. I love that this film is about women artists, by a team of talented, passionate, diverse, women artists.
Q: Has the meaning of the project shifted since the election and inauguration?
A: I don’t think it’s shifted, but it’s certainly become more urgent and meaningful to American women. For example, we created T-shirts for the Ann Arbor test screening of Little Stones and I got a number of texts from friends, family, and colleagues saying they wore their tees to the Women’s March. As one woman said, “I wore my Little Stones shirt as I carried a sign and wore pink kitty ears with my daughter and friends at the Women's March in A2 on Saturday. Those beautiful women speaking out about gender-based violence seemed like the perfect shirt for the occasion.”
I’ve also had a few organizations reach out since the march, asking if they can screen the film on their campus or at their community movie theater. Yes, you can! Here’s how: littlestones.org/hostscreening. So it’s clear Americans are ready to hear more POSITIVE stories about individuals working to create social change.
Personally, after working on Little Stones for nearly 4 years, I’ve felt a renewed sense of purpose, and hope that although the stories we tell in the film are global, it will inspire more dialogue and action within the U.S. around gender-based violence, domestic violence, forced labor and trafficking, the gender-pay gap, reproductive rights, and more. As I travel and speak about Little Stones in the coming months, I’ll be focusing my talks on women’s issues closer to home and what American audiences, including MEN, can do to support gender equality locally.
Q: Talk more about the nonprofit you started alongside the film. How can people learn more about supporting the film and the organization?
A: Driftseed is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that was founded by me, Little Stones cinematographer/co-producer Meena Singh, and Meena’s cousin Ankita Singh, who is a lawyer based in Washington, D.C. Driftseed seeks to empower women and girls locally and globally through documentary storytelling. We’ve partnered with the University of Michigan School of Education to create lesson plans, resources, and discussion guides to support high school and university screenings of Little Stones. We’re also working with them to develop a TAKE ACTION resource guide, so viewers of Little Stones can learn more about how they can donate, volunteer, shop, create art, and otherwise support the fight for gender equality globally. These bonus materials, along with bonus educational videos, clips from the film and interviews with Meena and I, will be free on the Little Stones website later this year.
Driftseed is also starting to develop new documentary projects, including a feature focused on American women in the modern workplace. Driftseed also offers fiscal sponsorship to other women filmmakers creating documentaries about women’s issues, lending our non-profit status to other worthy projects. Our first fiscally sponsored film is called Break the Chain about human trafficking in Michigan by former Driftseed intern and documentary producer/director Laura Swanson, and everyone should go watch the trailer for her film now, and make sure to go to one of her upcoming screenings in Michigan that start in February 2017.
Q: You are coming back from L.A. where you recently moved, for the first time as a visitor to Ann Arbor after having lived here your whole life. What's that like?
A: Cold! Just kidding. I love Ann Arbor. Family, friends, former colleagues, and nearly all our organizational, funding, and education partners for Little Stones are based in Michigan. It’s fun and energizing to see everyone again, but also a bittersweet reminder of the wonderful community that I’m no longer a member of. Los Angeles is big, and I’m still finding my way there. I love how small and supportive Ann Arbor is, but my dream is to reach more people and have an impact beyond my hometown. To do that, I feel the need to be in a place that funds larger-budget documentaries and distributes them to an international audience. In L.A., that really seems possible.
Anna Prushinskaya is a writer living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. More at annaprushinskaya.com.
Catch Sophia Kruz, and many other Dreamers and Disruptors at TEDxUofM on Wednesday, February 8 at 6 pm on campus or via livestream. To learn more about Driftseed and to stay up to date on "Little Stones," join the mailing list. To make a tax-deductible donation to support future Driftseed films and the "Little Stones" outreach and education campaign, head to driftseed.org/donate.