DOORS OPEN @ 7:00...SCREENING STARTS @ 7:30
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The 53rd Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour #1 - 16mm
With Special Performance By Potter-Belmar Labs
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:
A Symptom
Ben Balcom
Milwaukee, WI | 2014 | 7 min | 16mm
The Colorlab / Niagara / ORWO Award for Best Cinematography
A mirrored discourse. The object we see is that which craves articulation, but is never said quite right. We are looking at speech from both sides of the mirror, listening to that wretch who elaborates upon the grid of desire. – BB
The Song Remains The Same
Mark Toscano
Los Angeles, CA | 2014 | 5 min | 16mm
Prix DeVarti for Funniest Film
When feelings are reduced to keywords, it’s a lot easier to find just the right soundtrack. And when an emotional response can be so readily activated via musical triggers, it’s a lot easier to make a moving film. – MT
The Dragon is the Frame
Mary Helena Clark
Berkeley, CA | 2014 | 14 min | 16mm
An experimental detective film made in remembrance: keeping a diary, footnotes of film history, and the puzzle of depression. – MHC
Poetry for Sale
Friedl vom Gröller
Vienna, Austria | 2014 | 3 min | 16mm
In Poetry for Sale, Friedl vom Gröller impressively contrasts the intimacy of the act of writing and the publicity of its presentation. The difficulty of the undertaking, selling poems in the subway, shows the difficulty of material survival for poets. The double breaking of the rules on which the film is based—both selling and filming are forbidden in the subway—exposes both poetry and filming as criminal acts, thus revealing the true status of poets and filmmakers. – Nicole Streitler
Peacock
Andrew Kim
Los Angeles, CA | 2015 | 12 min | 16mm
53rd AAFF Juror Award
A meditation on our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence… “The peacock painted on the window will never dance or speak. It is only the peacock that lived in the forest which used to speak, dance, and walk in a sweet manner.” – AK
vindmøller
Margaret Rorison
Baltimore, MD | 2015 | 3 min | 16mm
The Colorlab / Niagara / ORWO Award for Best Cinematography
A study of the monolithic wind turbines along the shores of Amager, Copenhagen, Denmark. Triple exposed on one roll of color film, then finding four generations of grain. The soundtrack is a recorded live-improvisation by artist Mario de Vega using unstable media and acoustic resonators. - MR
Things
Ben Rivers
London, UK | 2014 | 21 min | 16mm
The Stan Brakhage Film at Wit’s End Award
This film was a challenge set by a friend, to make something in my home over the course of the year. Coming from a country where the seasons are very evident, I am interested in how they effect people's sense of the world, moods, and our understanding and relationship to our environment. These mood changes feed into the film - in the Winter section the film is very internal and reflective, looking at the details around the house, and back to the things I've collected. In Spring, the atmosphere brightens, there are humans, hands holding a book or drawing, an eye reading. Summer is a mix of both the joy of these things, countered with a sense of unease. Autumn then becomes a further remove of representation of the space I live in, and in an uncertain state--are the walls crumbling around me? Is this the future, partly foretold in Fable, the book read in Spring? - BR
Blue Loop, July
Mike Gibisser
Iowa City, IA | 2014 | 5 min | 16mm
The Colorlab / Niagara / ORWO Award for Best Cinematography
Chicago’s summertime blazes, unanchored. Skywriting out of time. Part of a series of nighttime long exposures, Blue Loop, July creates an odd document of a long-standing celebratory
tradition in one of Chicago’s lower west side neighborhoods. By leaving the camera’s shutter open for seconds at a time, the film transforms a summertime spectacle into a light-trace animation that unseats reliability of spatial and temporal direction. – MG
Falling
Robert Todd
Boston, MA | 2015 | 7 min | 16mm
Moving through fall’s end and beginning, falling. – RT
Color Neutral
Jennifer Reeves
New York, NY | 2014 | 3 min | 16mm
Anything but gray, a color explosion sparkles, bubbles, and fractures in this hand-crafted 16mm film. Reeves utilized an array of mediums and direct-on-film techniques to create this exuberant, psychedelic morsel of cinema as material. But it speaks of the end of one era or another, a time for letting go and celebration.
a certain worry
Jonathan Schwartz
Brattleboro, VT | 2014 | 3 min | 16mm
a certain worry enveloped in the covering of the ground, illuminated around a face, light on something ferocious, touch upon something gentle. -JS
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Sarah J Christman
Brooklyn, NY | 2015 | 6 min | 16mm
Coda for a film stock. A cresting wave, a pregnancy in the third trimester, a tennis match in the fourth set, the cicadas’ song - a stream of precarious moments of falling action, caught before their end. – SC
Accent Grave on Ananas
Tamara Henderson (with sound by Dan Riley)
Vancouver, Canada | 2013 | 3 min | 16mm
Leon Speakers Award for Best Sound Design
“Henderson’s work emerges from dreams and the movement of their images and experiences into her waking life. In processing these subconscious traces the narratives slip through memories and clichés, desires and trauma. She persistently establishes quotidian objects as near characters before altering them in abrupt or impossible ways: a play of expectation and surprise.
The film’s succession of events is carefully planned so it can be edited in camera, captured in single shots as if experiencing the dream. In this Surrealist tradition, everyday objects are manipulated by unseen hands and the sequenced juxtaposition of these moments creates a narrative that is at once absurd and highly familiar. These sequences allude to chain reactions, operations carried out with focused concentration to meditate on the banal and uncanny with equal attention, troubling out their esoteric truths.” – Mouse Magazine
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