Films & Events

ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
Established in 1963, the Ann Arbor Film Festival is the oldest avant garde and experimental film festival in North America. In 2024, the festival featured over 40 programs consisting of 110 films from nearly 40 countries of all lengths and genres, including experimental, animation, documentary, narrative, hybrid, and performance based works. The 62nd Festival took place in person March 26-31, 2024 and online March 26-April 7. Film submissions for the 63rd Festival (March 25-30, 2024) will be accepted July 1 through September 30, 2024.

TRAVELING TOUR
The Ann Arbor Film Festival, a pioneer of the film festival touring concept, has been presenting an annual tour of selected works from the festival since 1964 to galleries, art house theaters, museums, universities, libraries, microcinemas, and media arts centers throughout the world. All filmmakers participating on the tour are paid to screen their work, providing direct support to these independent artists.

PROGRAM

Intersextion | Richard Roger Reeves Creston, BC, Canada | 2022 | 4min
Best Experimental Animation Award
Two abstract energies fall in love, unite as one, then disappear into a vanishing point. Intersextion expresses a symbiotic interplay between two cosmic energies, contrasting the intersection of reality and self–expression. A film without words. No camera or musical instrument was used.

Getting OK With Being OK That Things Are Not OK | Zoë Irvine & Pernille Spence Edinburgh & Dundee, UK | 2023 | 4min
Prix DeVarti for Funniest Film
This film represents an exploration into ideas of precarity and collapse, moments of the not–yet- happening as well as irreversible smashes. How do we learn to live in uncertainty? When the future holds promise of breakdown? We embrace the absurdity, the moments of lightness and humor. We are actively trying to get OK with not being OK that things are not OK. 

This Line Connects the Void | Tram Quynh Nghiem, Toronto, ON, Canada | 2023 | 16min
Filmed in the artist’s family apartment on the edge of Parkdale in the city of Toronto, this work explores the poetics of grief and precarity for the family around the time of death and dying regarding the artist’s sister. With nonlinear storytelling and fragmented images, the work moves between speculative fiction, documentary, and experimental film. 

Chasing Birds | Una Lorenzen, Montreal, QC, Canada | 2022 | 8min
Chris Frayne Award for Best Animated Film
In Chasing Birds, we follow a little girl who playfully chases a bird throughout a chaotic and transformational period. Chasing Birds is a story about disconnection between people and how change can be a terrifying or invigorating experience, depending what angle you see it from. 

de–composition | Laura Kraning, Buffalo, NY | 2023 | 3min
A textural macro collage of a rust belt landscape–scratched, splattered, dripping, cracking, and bursting to the surface. Photographed and meticulously edited over one year in Buffalo, NY, the reverberant tones of the New York Central rail line provide the rhythmic pulse to a rapid cascade of multihued material decay and metallic de–composition. 

The Sketch | Tomas Cali, Paris, France | 2023 | 9min
Ken Burns Award for Best of the Festival
I learn to speak French and by doing so, to sculpt my reality. In an artist’s studio in Paris, I meet Linda Demorrir, a living model. Like me, she is transgender and an immigrant. When she speaks, moves, sees the world, I am fascinated. As I draft her outlines, it is myself also that I learn to draw in this new country. 

Nothing Special | Efrat Berger Jerusalem, Israel | 2023 | 15min
The Eileen Maitland Award
Between four walls, two women are waiting. One let death come and get her. The other let her life finally begin. Based on a recorded conversation, the film simulates their attempt to escape what they can’t help but experience, as they realize that “nothing” can sometimes be special. 

Matta and Matto | Bianca Caderas & Kerstin Zemp, Basel & Bern, Switzerland | 2023 | 10min
The Edge of Your Seat Award
In a dystopian world where touch is forbidden, Matta and Matto offer refuge to the lonely at Hotel Vaip. In the deceptive labyrinth of mind–bending rooms at their transient hotel, deepest desires are fulfilled and surpassed–but this comes at a price. 

Long Time No Techno | Eugenia Bakurin, Kiel, Germany | 2022 | 4min
Juror Award
Bakurin appropriates Soviet film footage from the Odesa Film Studio (the Russian Empire’s first film studio) to reclaim a memory of a lost childhood of two belligerent countries, inviting viewers to look for their own recollections in the same footage, creating an act of collective remembrance in the process. 

This program is one showtime that includes screenings of the entire film festival program, with a total runtime of 117min. 

117 min.