DOORS OPEN @ 1:00...SCREENING STARTS @ 1:30
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The 53rd Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour #2 - Digital Program
Poster Art By: Leah Busch
Installation Art By: Lorain Wible
Director Leslie Raymond presents two programs, one digital and one 16mm, that include award-winning works from the 53rd edition of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the nation’s longest running festival for experimental and independent film. The AAFF has had an annual traveling tour since the second edition of the festival in 1964. For the first 40 years of its existence, 16mm was the sole format shown at the festival. The 53rd AAFF Touring program presents 12 new films all projected in their original cinematic glory, as well as a separate program of digital shorts. The Thursday screening will be followed by a live cinema performance by Potter-Belmar Labs (Ann Arbor, MI).
Showing:
Corda
Pablo Lobato
Belo Horizonte, Brazil | 2014 | 7 min | Digital
Círio de Nazaré, held in Belém (Brazil) since 1793, is one of the biggest Catholic processions in the world. Each year millions of pilgrims accompany the saint’s statue competing for the privilege of holding the long sisal rope that leads the carriage throughout the city streets. In disarray with the rules of the celebration, and in order to assure their relics, some promisors cut the rope in the middle of the ritual. The video brings two different fluxes closer: one linear, guided by the entirety of the rope, the other chaotic, responding to the cut. – PL
Courtesy of the collection of Egbert and Loes Dommering
Herd
Ashley Sabin & David Redmon
Canada / USA | 2014 | 12 min | Digital
There is mystery to the sound and image. The focus is on an animal, but what animal? The image contains subtle movement. Gates slam as percussion to the quiet nighttime sounds. The delicate movement of the animals fur and flesh is contrasted against its sound, almost musical in pitch and tone. The beast creates a symphony of sounds. – AS & DR
Scrapbook
Mike Hoolboom
Toronto, Canada | 2015 | 19 min | 16mm on digital
Pat O'Neill Perseverance Furthers Award
53rd AAFF Audience Award
Lensed in Ohio’s Broadview Developmental Center in 1967 by secret camera genius and audio visual healer Jeffrey Paull, Scrapbook tells the story of audacious autistic Donna Washington in her own words, as she encounters pictures of one of her former selves fifty years later. – MH
Chapri
Katarzyna Płazińska
53rd AAFF Juror Award
Iowa City, IA | 2015 | 6 min | Digital
Light, shadow, and sound imprint themselves onto ephemeral making. – KP
Sightings: Habitat
Sabrina Ratté
Montreal, Canada | 2014 | 6 min | Digital
Sightings: Habitat explores the visual and sonic relationship between modular synthesis and simulated space. Ratté uses her signature modulator technique to intricately layer a series of moirés and checkerboards that bring depth to the otherwise flat surface of the screen. Ratté bends the signal of the video itself to carve out corridors of an undetermined distance. The simplicity and exactness of the vertical lines that dance across the screen suggest a kind of transcendental arrival at a near-perfect modular frequency where the input and output harmonize. With an elegant score by long-time collaborator Roger Tellier-Craig. – Nicholas O’Brien
Two Ways Down
Laura Heit
Portland, OR | 2015 | 3 min | Digital
Fall into the underworld, walk, slither, wriggle, fly, burn, and return to dirt. – LH
Kingdom Come: Rituals
Vika Kirchenbauer & Martin Sulzer
Berlin, Germany | 2014 | 7 min | Digital
Kingdom Come: Rituals is composed of aerial footage shot by pigeons equipped with lightweight Digital cameras flying over a political protest in Berlin. Kirchenbauer and Sulzer’s rediscovery of pigeon photography references a method used mainly for military purposes during World War I in the field of what would nowadays be called ‘unmanned reconnaissance’, a precursor of modern drone warfare.
Lessons of War
Peggy Ahwesh
Brooklyn, NY| 2014| 5 min | Digital
Five little narratives, ‘newsworthy’ stories from the most recent war in Gaza--retold to not forget the details, to reenact the trauma and to honor the dead. The footage is lifted from a Youtube channel that renders the news in animation, fantastic and imaginative and several protective layers away from reality. The footage is re-purposed here to critique that safe distance from the violence, the antiseptic nature of the virtual narrative. – PA
Courtesy of Microscope Gallery, New York
Reduit
John Skoog
Skåne, Sweden | 2014 | 14 min | Digital
In the early 1940s the farm-worker Karl-Göran Persson started to fortify his small house in the flat farmlands of southern Sweden. He wanted to build a place where he and the people in the village could find refuge in the event of a Soviet invasion. He took any metal he could get cheap or for free from the neighboring farmers and used it as reinforcement for the cement casting of the house’s new exterior walls. Karl-Göran lived alone in the house and continued his re-construction until his death in 1975.
Courtesy of Pilar Corrias Gallery, London
