Written By Julieta Gozalo
The 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival took place in-person and online from March 22-27 2022.
Their website states: “The Ann Arbor Film Festival is the oldest avant-garde and experimental film festival in North America, founded by George Manupelli in 1963. 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 presented 40 programs with more than 180 films from over 20 countries of all lengths and genres, including experimental, animation, documentary, fiction, and performance-based works.”
The different programs included:
Films in Competition: short film programs built from films submitted to our festival this year. Short films are all less than 60 minutes (usually less than 20 minutes), and each program will have anywhere from 6-14 films.
Features in Competition: programs that either consist of a single feature film (60 minutes or longer), or a feature and a short film that were submitted to the festival this year (if a program includes a paired feature and short, the films may relate to each other, but have not been submitted together by the same filmmaker).
Special Programs: specially curated programs of films that have not been submitted for award consideration this year, but instead were curated around a thematic idea by friends and artists of the Ann Arbor Film Festival.
Off The Screen! (OTS!): new media, video, live performance, and art installations that are either ongoing during festival week or happen at a specific time.
Speaker Series: panel discussions, workshops, and presentations by friends and artists of the Ann Arbor Film Festival.
Read below for a list of some of their featured films:
Still from the film elephant.
elephant
Maria Judice
San Francisco, CA | 2021 | 99 | HD Video
WORLD PREMIERE
After witnessing a murder of a young boy by a cop on her doorstep, Maria finds her mental health struggling. At thirty-seven, violence and death compound into a fear of the outside. As she self-isolates, she unpacks individual, collective, and generational trauma. Her beloved community keeps her connected with frequent care visits. elephant is a visual meditation on the physiology of grief.
Archipelago
Felix Dufour-Laperrière
Montreal, Canada | 2021 | 72 | HD Video
A true animated film about invented islands. About a physical, imaginary, linguistic, political territory. About a real or dreamed country, or something in between. Archipelago is a feature film made of drawings and speeches that tells and dreams a place and its inhabitants, to tell and dream a little of our world and times.
What We Shared
Kamila Kuc
London, UK / Sukhum, Abkhazia | 2021 | 69 | HD video
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
Seven inhabitants of a de facto state on the Black Sea unfurl a web of stories about loss and displacement through the re-imaginings of dreams and memories of the 1992–93 war in Abkhazia. To question the unstable distinction between fact and fiction, these re-imaginings are interwoven with auto-fictional narration and archival materials that have been processed through an AI technology. The Black Sea permeating the film’s universe acts as a metaphor for both an idyllic holiday destination of utopian happiness as well as a perilous force.
Experimental Curator: The Sally Dixon Story
Brigid Maher
Washington DC, New York City, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Saint Paul, Minneapolis, Denver, Lump Gulch, USA | 2022 | 57 | 4K Video
WORLD PREMIERE
A documentary that delves into the life of film curator Sally Dixon. Dixon was known as a trailblazer in the ”film as art” movement in the ’70s and founded and directed the Film Department at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Featuring interviews with Carolee Schneemann, Jonas Mekas, Bruce Baillie, Ken Jacobs, and Robert Haller.
Still from Experimental Curator: The Sally Dixon Story.