Travelling Tour of the 49th Ann Arbor Film Festival

Established in 1963, the Ann Arbor Film Festival is the longest-running independent and experimental film festival in North America. Internationally recognized as a premiere forum for independent filmmakers and artists, each year's festival engages audiences with remarkable cinematic experiences. The six-day festival presents 40 programs with more than 160 films from over 20 countries of all lengths and genres, including experimental, animation, documentary, narrative, hybrid and performance based works.

The Ann Arbor Film Festival is steeped in a rich tradition of ground-breaking cinema. Thousands of influential filmmakers have showcased early work at the AAFF, including luminaries such as Kenneth Anger, Agnes Varda, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Gus Van Sant, Barbara Hammer, Lawrence Kasdan, Devo and George Lucas. The Ann Arbor Film Festival receives more than 2,500 submissions annually from more than 65 countries and serves as one of a handful of Academy Award-qualifying festivals in the United States.

aafilmfest.org/

PART I: Thursday, January 19 at 7:30pm
Total Running Time: 80 minutes
Screening Format: Digi-Beta

NULEPSY Jessica Sarah Rinland
England | 2010 | 9 min. | 35mm on DV
A chronicle of a pathological need to be nude. An old man tells the story of growing up with a disease called nulepsy, which causes him to spontaneously remove his clothes. –JSR

HOME MOVIE
Braden King
USA | 2009 | 14 min. | DV | Best Narrative Film Award
Blurring the traditional boundaries between documentary and dramatic fiction, HOME MOVIE reveals an intimate and sombre portrait of a woman at home with her two small children as they cope with the unexplained absence of their father.

THE MECHANISM OF SPRING
Atsushi Wada
Japan | 2010 | 4 min. | DV | Prix DeVarti Funniest Film Award
An expression of the itchy feelings everyone experiences when Spring comes.
–AW

I TOUCHED HER LEGS
Eva Marie Rødbro
Denmark | 2010 | 15 min. | DV | Emerging Experimental Video Artist Award An extraordinary portrait of a group of Southern teens hanging out in cars, rooms, and neighbourhood yards in humid pool-party weather.

PINK
Soon-Mi Yoo
South Korea / USA | 2011 | 6 min. | DV | Jury Award
PINK is a glimpse into a world of Itaewon in Seoul, South Korea. Itaewon was an R&R area for the US soldiers from the Yongsan military base. Although it is still patrolled by US military personnel, foreign workers from Southeast Asia and Africa also frequent the district. In a small concentrated area called Hooker Hill, women sit inside bars and "screen" potential customers.
–SMY

IT, HEAT, HIT
Laure Prouvost
England | 2010 | 7 min. | DV
IT, HEAT, HIT constructs and propels an inferred story through a fast-moving sequence of written commentary and excerpts of everyday incidents and pictures that have been filmed by the artist.

JAN VILLA
Natasha Mendonca
India / USA | 2010 | 20 min. | 16mm on DV | Best of the Festival Award After the monsoon floods of 2005 that submerged Bombay, the filmmaker returns to her city to examine the personal impact of the devastating event. The result is JAN VILLA, a tapestry of images that studies the space of a post-colonial metropolis.

ALIKI
Richard Wiebe
USA | 2009 | 5 min. | DV | Most Promising Filmmaker Award Lake Aliki, Cyprus. For centuries, flamingos have wintered here from Iran. It is said that Lazarus spent his days on the shores of this lake after his resurrection—staring into the sun to shake off the darkness of the grave.

PART 2: Sunday, January 22 at 6:00pm
Total Running Time: 85 minutes
Screening Format: 16mm

HEPWORTH
Alexis Bravos
USA | 2011 | 11 min. | 16mm | Eileen Maitland Award A portrait of the landscape in Cornwall where the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth lived and worked. "Landscape is strong – it has bones and flesh and skin and hair. It has age and history and a principle behind its evolution." –Barbara Hepworth, 1966

BENEATH YOUR SKIN OF DEEP HOLLOW
Malena Szlam
Chile / Canada | 2010 | 3 min. | 16mm
Originally shot in super-8 and edited in-camera, BENEATH YOUR SKIN OF DEEP HOLLOW translates nights into arrhythmic movements of light and a fugue of colour. Shimmering impressions emerge into the surface of agitated stillness while darkness illuminates reflections and sight. –MS

CRY WHEN IT HAPPENS
Laida Lertxundi
USA | 2010 | 14 min. | 16mm
Los Angeles City Hall is reflected onto the window of the Paradise Motel. It serves as an anchor for this traversal through the natural expanse of California. Here, we discover a restrained psychodrama of play, loss, and the transformation of everyday habitats. Music appears across the interiors and exteriors and speaks of limitlessness and longing. –LL

RAYNING
Robert Todd
USA | 2010 | 6 min. | 16mm
Light rayns-rains-reigns across a dream of tranquility that thickens, darkens and evaporates. –RT

BERLIN TRACKS 18h00-20h00
Shiloh Cinquemani
Germany / USA | 2011 | 3 min. | 16mm
BERLIN TRACKS 18h00-20h00 is a mesmerizing and rhythmic view of the railway tracks stretching out from under the Modersohnbrücke (Modersohn Bridge) towards Warshauer Str. S-Bahn Station in Berlin-Friedrichshain, Germany.

RAY'S BIRDS
Deborah Stratman
USA | 2010 | 7 min. | 16mm | Jury Award
Ray Lowden keeps seventy-two large birds of prey, five deer and some wallabies at his place in Northumberland, England. He's had ten days off in twelve years and loves what he does. The film is a little homage to his variously coy, imperious, curious, stubborn and comic raptor menagerie. –DS

FORSAKEN
James Sansing
USA | 2010 | 7 min. | 16mm
Forsaken explores an abandoned juvenile detention centre. The neglect of the building is a metaphor for the children who had once lived there. –JS

NEW YEAR SUN
Jonathan Schwartz
USA | 2010 | 3 min. | 16mm | Jury Award
For listening to the sound of ice thinning with its brightness that comes. –JS

THE FLORESTINE COLLECTION
Helen Hill & Paul Gailiunas
USA | 2010 | 31 min. | 16mm | Jury Award
Experimental animator Helen Hill found more than 100 handmade dresses in a trash pile on one Mardi Gras Day in New Orleans. She set out to make a film about the dressmaker, an African-American seamstress who had recently passed away. The dresses and much of the film footage were later flood-damaged by Hurricane Katrina while Helen was still working on the film. Helen was murdered in a home invasion in New Orleans in 2007. Her husband Paul Gailiunas has completed the film, which includes Helen's original silhouette, cut-out, and puppet animation, as well as flood-damaged and restored home movies.