Ann Arbor Film Festival : All posts

Ann Arbor Film Festival announces 2013 award winners

"Our Nixon" is among this year's Ann Arbor Film Festival award winners.

with video: Ken Burns packs the Michigan Theater for Penny W. Stamps talk

Related articles:

• Q and A: Ken Burns talks of Ann Arbor, film festival screening of latest work

• 51st Ann Arbor Film Festival looks both forward and back

Filmmaker Ken Burns spoke to a capacity crowd at the Michigan Theater on Thursday evening.

Andrew Kuhn | AnnArbor.com

with video: NPR-highlighted 'Leviathan' part of the Ann Arbor Film Festival

• Related story: Full Ann Arbor Film Festival preview

q and a: Ken Burns talks of Ann Arbor, lecture on race, and festival screening of new work

Related story: 51st Ann Arbor Film Festival looks both forward and back

Ken Burns

AP file photo

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51st annual Ann Arbor Film Festival looks both forward and back

Related story: Q and A: Ken Burns talks about Ann Arbor, lecture on race, and festival screening of new work

An image from the archival documentary "Our Nixon."

Photo provided by the Ann Arbor Film Festival

Ann Arbor Film Festival receives $40,000 grant from Warhol Foundation

The Ann Arbor Film Festival has received a $40,000 two-year grant from the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to present special programs at the 52nd and 53rd festivals, taking place in March of 2014 and 2015.

Donald Harrison resigns from Ann Arbor Film Festival

During his four years as director, Donald was responsible for positive changes within the AAFF. Under his leadership, the organization built an outstanding staff, which have rebuilt the festival’s international reputation - making it, once again, one of the most renowned film festivals in the world. Donald opened the AAFF to other community organizations that now participate with several of the festival’s programs; and under Donald’s leadership, the AAFF initiated additional special programs throughout the calendar year, introducing AAFF to many new people.

@theAAFF: So long, and thanks for all the films

All this past week, Ryan has covered the movies and moments of the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival in the Michigan Theater, sharing his experiences of the festival. Share your thoughts and stories in the comments. Hope you enjoyed a great week of experimental film!

And that's a wrap.

Photo by Ryan Levin

On the final weekend of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, performance artist Pat Oleszko took to the stage before a films in competition screening, dressed as a silvery candelabra with ten volunteers, filmmakers and friends in full body birthday cake costumes.

Balancing prop candles on her shoulders, hands and one on her head, Oleszko orchestrated a dance of the candles while a camera overhead projected a top-down view of stage onto the main auditorium's mammoth screen.

Before exiting down the aisles, encouraging festival goers to blow out her film festival candles as they walked by, Oleszko arranged the performers in single line on the stage over a waist high curtain decorated like the side of a cake and lead the audience in a rendition of "Happy Birthday."

So what do you get a film festival for its 50th birthday?

@theAAFF: Art on film

All this week, Ryan is covering the movies and moments of the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival in the Michigan Theater, sharing his experiences of the festival. Share your thoughts and stories in the comments and enjoy a great week of experimental film!

After five days of marathon experimental film viewing at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, your brain feels a bit like it's been turned to mush. Your eyes buzz at night like they've been used as some mad scientist's plasma globes, but there's a sensation too like you're really starting to just "get it."

The whole thing. Why we're there. Why filmmakers fly in from Boston, from Finland, from England, from California to here. Why the festival has survived for 50 years and why people kept coming back to sit in front of a screen and feel elated, confounded, challenged, ecstatic and changed. You sort of start to see patterns of representations, ways that experimental filmmakers can change your perception of the world.

How they can make a regular thing strange and then pluck a entirely new meaning out of it.

It's a singular experience: watching avant-garde art movies in a massive movie auditorium with a crowd of people. You'll get the occasional heckler who feels compelled to express how boring and ordinary he is with an exaggerated yawn or a sarcastic clap. But on the whole its a group of entranced, eager and excited people who, like you, are just "into it."

If you take your eyes away and glance down from the screen during a film and see the light flickering off the sea of faces, there's something almost like a religious experience going on here. Like sitting around a campfire sharing dreams. You wonder: how is everyone else experiencing this? Are they getting any of it? What do they think of this scene?

Or at least I did.

MUSINGS ON THE NEWS

EDITORIAL: Latest economic report welcome news for Ann Arbor area; Film Festival turns 50

Musings on the news of the past week:

If you’re weary of the prolonged economic slump that we’ve been suffering through, news came out this past week that could leave you absolutely giddy.

According to an economic forecast commissioned by AnnArbor.com, our local economy is headed for a period of economic job growth that we haven’t seen since the dizzying days of the mid- and late-1990s.

@theAAFF: The things you'll see, the people you'll meet

All this week, Ryan is covering the movies and moments of the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival in the Michigan Theater, sharing his experiences of the festival. Share your thoughts and stories in the comments and enjoy a great week of experimental film!

Photo by Ryan Levin

If there was ever any question of how much a part of the greater Ann Arbor community the festival is when it plays at the Michigan Theater every March, glance over the page-long list of donors, supporters and businesses offering their wares to the benefit of the non-profit film festival.

Around the city, film and video installations illuminate the streets as part of the festival's 50 SCREENS series. In the window of Encore Records, an array of television screens showcase a woman in a white toga emerging eternally from a halo of pink and blue clouds.

There's a wandering exhibit in the shape of a man in bright sapphire lights on a dolly like a neon Hannibal Lector with a screen where his face should be. It stops at street corners on the sidewalks around the Michigan Theater where passersby can be seen gazing inside.

Back inside the theater, there's a bike powered zoetrope and a tower of screens controlled by an iPad that's a video interpretation of the parlor game exquisite corpse. On the zoetrope, you pedal and stare through the slats onto the spinning paper loop and frames of an animated trip down a country road flitter past and merge and blend and (depending on your speed) become a single, animated frame.

As you gaze into the exhibits or mull over the current highest bid of an auction item, you might feel a gust of breeze at your back with the quick tapping of shoes and maybe the slurping of a cup of coffee. Chances are, that would be the omnipresent rushing blurs of Executive Director Donald Harrison or Program Director David Dinnell. If you're at the festival for any length you'll run across them constantly, as they take the stage to introduce ever screening and program.

These were some of the things you'd see at the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Still from Bruce Baillie "Castro St."

@theAAFF: At Out Night

All this week, Ryan is covering the movies and moments of the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival in the Michigan Theater, sharing his experiences of the festival. Share your thoughts and stories in the comments and enjoy a great week of experimental film!

Photo by Ryan Levin

The regional collegiate film showcase represented film programs from schools across the state. There was one from Interlochen and five combined from the University of Michigan's art and design and screen arts and cultures programs.

There was a dubstep video project from Eastern Michigan University, four shorts from Washtenaw Community College, a surreal date film reedited from the 1980s from Oakland Community College, and three short movies from the College of Creative Studies in Detroit.

The showcase of talent showed student filmmakers reaching adroitly into all areas of film making and experimental cinema. These weren't amateurs tinkering clumsily with the tools of moviemaking.

@theAAFF: This was opening night

All this week, Ryan will be covering the movies and moments of the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival in the Michigan Theater, sharing his experiences of the festival. Share your thoughts and stories in the comments and enjoy a great week of experimental film!

Photo by Ryan Levin

It's a two-hour party with filmmakers and festival staff, donors and movie lovers in attendance, catered by Ann Arbor businesses with complimentary drinks and appetizers.

The main floor swarmed with party-goers. There was a DJ jauntily spinning red records at a table next to the staircase. The lower landing was decorated with something that looked vaguely like the front of a particularly artsy carnival fun house ride with a half-open film shutter beckoning you inside.

Servers rushed in and out with trays of appetizers. People were hanging off the railings, finding seats on the staircase steps, pressed around tables and arms would reach out and grasp snacks from the black trays.

There were preserves on goat cheese and crunchy bread, miniature cupcakes piled high with frosting, square slices of pizzas and fried doughy things with indiscernable combinations of mushrooms, meat and roasted veggies.

Champagne was served on the top floor, bubbling out of specially labeled AAFF 50th bottles. Cocktails were on the ground floor near the back of the lobby, past the staircase and the DJ booth by the ramp down to the screening room.

Two harried but indefatigable bartenders from The Ravens Club slung drinks out to a mass of patrons pressing around the table. The drinks were named after notables from film and the festival's history.

There was the Anita Ekberg with vodka and splashes of blackberry syrup. The Michigan Theater Manhattan garnished with a bourbon soaked cherry. I had two George Manupellis - named after the festival's founder - a healthy dose of Maker's Mark chilled with orange liqueur and a few dashes of bitters. They were strong drinks.

Technical director Tom Bray was walking around with an iPhone taped onto the back of an iPad on a stick, projecting from the phone's camera onto the LCD screen, as people began filing into the main theater amid towers of mini-cupcakes trying to find themselves a decent seat.

photo gallery: Images from opening night of the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival

The Ann Arbor Film Festival opened for its 50th edition Tuesday night. Photographer Chris Asadian captured these images.

Check out all our coverage of the festival, and see the festival website for more information.

opinion

Why the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival matters

Here's a confession: Ann Arbor was the town that made me love film.

You might recognize the story: I hit the ground running off my high school graduation stage to come to Ann Arbor to do all those things new college students fill their time with.

Fiddling with identity, angsting over your future, attending a party or 30 and pondering a half-dozen potential majors while taking every "Intro To" class that could fit into a schedu—provided they all started sometime after 12 o'clock.

I remember starting sure I was going to study computer science, then it was creative writing, then philosophy, then math, then literature, then history—I flirted with a degree in astronomy somewhere in there as well. Then I took a class on Central European Cinema, which at the time I believe also managed to fulfill one of the ancillary requirements to graduate with an LS&A degree. And, hey, it was a class on movies.

opinion

The beginner's guide to the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival

So you've never been to the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

This couldn't be a better year to go to your first.

The 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival is set to turn downtown Ann Arbor into a six-day international showcase of experimental, ground-breaking avant garde and documentary cinema.

Artists and filmmakers from around the world will converge on our little big city and fill the Michigan Theater to bursting with triumphs, movies and dreams, with filmmakers who have sought to delve the depths of human experience with the tools of the modern cinema.

And it's happening right in your backyard.

For a cinephile, it's a whirlwind, a wild cacophony of visions and ideas and things you have never dreamt of or seen. For one week, a glittering venue is given to movies and filmmakers whose work ordinarily lies narrowly or rarely seen. The movies of artists and visionaries, the pioneers and experimenters who are located at the edges and the core of cinema have a chance to be seen in a theater.

It can be a daunting prospect to step into the festival for the first time.

Where do you begin? What programs must you see? How do you best get the festival experience on a limited schedule? What if you've never seen an experimental film before? How do you pick between the talks, presentations, programs, screenings and performances playing in the two screening rooms in the Michigan and beyond?

Ann Arbor Film Festival: A 50-year timeline

The Ann Arbor Film Festival opens Tuesday for its landmark 50th edition. Here's a look back at some highlights and key moments:

1964 - Film critic Pauline Kael attends as an AAFF judge; Kenneth Anger screens his influential film, “Scorpio Rising”; and the first AAFF traveling tour visits L.A., Berkeley and Paris.

1965 - Local fireworks erupt when the AAFF is accused of showing “pornographic films.” According to a program essay by Manupelli, “a secret knock let one film in and out of the locked (projection) booth at the time, delivered from moving automobiles encircling the auditorium. In the event of a raid on the booth, the film being projected would be quickly snipped from the projector and lowered to a waiting conspirator in the audience below, while ‘The Easter Story’ was threaded in its place.”

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Ann Arbor Film Festival turning 50, but it's as hip as ever

A still from the experimental feature film "Voluptuous Sleep," which will be screened as part of the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

With 200 experimental and independent films in competition (drawn from more than 2,700 submissions from 70 different countries), as well as special programs, panels, installations, performances, and appearances, the fest offers a feast of programming that aims to celebrate film as an art form.

“It really is a cross between what we typically go out to see movies for and what you go out to the MOCAD (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit) or the DIA (Detroit Institute of Arts) for,” said AAFF Director Donald Harrison. “There’s that experience of new ideas, and seeing something in a new way, as opposed to just being entertained.”

Paul Wiener | A Head in the Cloud

COLUMN: This week's web picks: An Antarctica radio station, Ann Arbor Film Festival archives and more

A-Net Station

There are really only two reasons to love this page: the music it streams, and its links to Antarctica. I'm not sure which I like more.

The site was set up in Antarctica by George Maat and was one of the first internet radio stations to offer nonstop, commercial-free, mellow folk music streams of the highest quality — musicians like Isaac Guillory, John Prine and Duck Baker. The sound is as crisp and clear as Antarctic air. Links to and videos of the musicians are included.

The research substation down there seems to be part of A-Net, which would explain why spectacular photographs of the area, updated daily, are on the site, as well as weather charts, livecams and links to climate change and various esoteric computing and climatology issues. A big dose of clever, tongue-in-cheek humor is hidden in the slapdash design, asides and hidden hyperlinks, and testifies to the humble pride, camaraderie and job satisfaction of the guys living and working down in that frozen chunk of heaven.

column

martin bandyke: A golden year ahead for the Ann Arbor Film Festival

A particularly special year for one of the most important events on our city’s cultural calendar, the Ann Arbor Film Festival celebrates its golden anniversary later this month with all kinds of must-see programming both new and archival. The festival was once again inundated with entries, with around 200 films chosen out of the 2,700 submissions sent in from more than seventy countries.

This is the fourth festival helmed by Donald Harrison, the friendly and erudite University of Michigan grad with a boundless passion for boundary-pushing films. Recently I had a chance to talk to the festival’s director about his plans for the 50th edition of what is widely regarded as one of the most important showcases for experimental cinema anywhere. The Ann Arbor Film Festival takes place at the Michigan Theater and other locations about town from March 27 through April 1, with more info at www.aafilmfest.org.

Q: What do you have planned for opening night celebrations this year?