49th Tour Programs
The 49th AAFF Tour offers 24 short films available in multiple programs, each featuring award-winning and favorite new selected works.
Part A Part B 16mm Program
PART A [80 minutes; digital formats]
Nulepsy - Jessica Sarah Rinland | England | 9 min
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 | 14 min
[AAFF Best Narrative Award]
Blurring the traditional boundaries between documentary and dramatic fiction, Home Movie reveals an intimate and somber 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 | 4 min
[AAFF Prix DeVarti for Funniest Film]
An expression of the itchy feelings everyone experiences when Spring comes. –AW
I Touched Her Legs - Eva Marie Rødbro | Denmark | 15 min
[AAFF Emerging Experimental Video Artist Award]
An extraordinary portrait of a group of Southern teens hanging out in cars, rooms, and neighborhood yards in humid pool-party weather. Rødbro creates a deft and skillful montage in which animals, insects children and adolescents all inhabit an environment easily and warmly shared. Through subtly glancing shots taken at oblique angles and in brief bursts, I Touched Her
Legs reaches directly into the soul of this small band of friends
and explains everything that is important without a single dull
expository declaration on their circumstances.
Pink - Soon-Mi Yoo | USA/S. Korea | 6 min
[AAFF 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 | 7 min
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. Innocent and pleasing images, such as a swimming frog or snowy street scene, are followed by statements of love and implied violence. These are inter-cut with strange, disconnected images, such as close-ups of flowers, body parts or food. The mood of the film gradually becomes darker and more unsettling, though nothing is stated directly. The growing intensity of the film is reinforced by
the oppressive rhythm of a drum which accompanies snatches of
music and speech.
Jan Villa - Natasha Mendonca | India/USA | 20 min
[AAFF Best of 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 but in a way that deeply implicates the personal. The destruction wreaked by the floods becomes a telling and a dismantling of other devastation's and the sanctuaries of family and home. In its structure, Jan Villa is a vortex, drawing to its center all that surrounds it.
Aliki - Richard Wiebe | USA | 5 min
[AAFF Most Promising Filmmaker Award]
Lake Aliki, Cyprus. For centuries, flamingos have wintered here from Iran. Rimbaud encountered them when he worked a quarry in Larnaca. 7th century Arab raiders described them to mark the burial site of Umm Haram, Aunt of the Prophet Muhammad. 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. The Greeks represented flamingos in poetry, the Romans slaughtered them for their tongues. Today, a man sings:
Pharmacist, oh pharmacist, oh pharmacist,
I want medicine for myself, I want medicine for myself,
My heart, my heart, my heart is beating like this,
My heart is afflicted because of you.
PART B [80 minutes; digital formats]
Miramare - Michaela Müller | Croatia | 8 min
A look at life on the Mediterranean borders of Europe, where tourists try to relax while "illegal" immigrants struggle to get a chance for a better life. –MM
Atlantiques - Mati Diop | Senegal/France | 15 min
Sitting by the campfire, Serigne, a young man from Dakar, tells his two friends the story of his sea voyage as a stowaway. Not only he, but everyone in his surroundings seems to be continually obsessed by the idea of trying to cross the sea. His words reverberate like a melancholic poem. A story about boys who are continually traveling: between past, present and future, between life and death, history and myth.
Protopartículas - Chema García Ibarra | Spain | 7 min
The experiment was almost a success: protomatter exists.
Hand Soap - Kei Oyama | Japan | 16 minutes
[AAFF Best Animation Award]
A calm yet sultry animation about a family with a growing adolescent son. His insecurity, his obsession with his body and his ill-at-ease family are reflected in details and objects that occasionally lead a life of their own. –KO
Point Line Plane - Simon Payne | England | 9 min
Shifting grids in black, white and shades of grey plot and continuously reframe screen space. The increasingly complex matrix of layers produces an illusion of depth, beyond the surface of the screen, but with positive and negative switching, the piece also illuminates the viewer. –SP
These Hammers Don't Hurt Us - Michael Robinson
USA | 13 min
[AAFF Most Technically Innovative Film Award]
Tired of underworld and overworld alike, Isis escorts her favorite son on their final curtain call down the Nile, leaving a neon wake of shattered tombs and sparkling sarcophagi. –MR
Looking to a future beyond death, Michael Robinson's These Hammers Don't Hurt Us , one of the filmmaker's most sophisticated found footage concoctions yet, combined Michael Jackson's "Remember the Time" music video with footage of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra and roughly a dozen other sources, creating for the late pop star a solemn passage into a bedazzled Egyptian afterlife tenderly ushered by his real-life confidante. –Genevieve Yue, Reverse Shot
In the Absence of Light, Darkness Prevails - Fern Silva
USA/Brazil | 13 min
[AAFF Best Experimental Film Award]
“O mother of waters! Great is your power, your strength, and your light...Let your greatness be the greatest wealth you dispense to me... surrounded by sweet melodies springing from your own self...” –prayer to Iemanjá
Fern Silva’s In the Absence of Light, Darkness Prevails suggests a future already arrived, merging the destruction with the creation of life as seen in the tiny turtles crawling their way to the sea, or heard in the crackling of a Geiger counter as a masked man sprays plants with pesticides. Though only 13 minutes, the film’s span is enormous. As revelers in Salvador, Bahia, parade through the streets, a gnat-sized Mercury passes across the surface of the sun, and men slowly make their way up the giant steps of an ancient temple; the film resides in a well of deep time, civilizational history swallowed by the life of the planet. –Genevieve Yue, Reverse Shot
16MM PROGRAM [85 minutes; 2 x 16mm reels]
Hepworth – Alexis Bravos | Ann Arbor, MI | 11 min
[AAFF 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. Original film score composed by Ash Bowie.
Beneath Your Skin of Deep Hollow – Malena Szlam
Montreal, Canada | 3 min
Originally shot and edited in a Super-8 camera, Beneath Your Skin of Deep Hollow translates nights into arrhythmic movements of light and a fugue of color. Shimmering impressions emerge into the surface of agitated stillness while darkness illuminates reflections and sight. –MS
Cry When It Happens – Laida Lertxundi
Los Angeles, CA | 14 min
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 | Boston, MA | 6 min
Light rayns-rains-reigns across a dream of tranquility that thickens, darkens and evaporates. –RT
Berlin Tracks 18h00-20h00 – Shiloh Cinquemani
Cambridge, MA | 3 min
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 – Debra Stratman | Chicago, IL | 7 min
[AAFF 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 | San Rafael, CA | 7 min
Forsaken explores an abandoned juvenile detention center. The neglect of the building is a metaphor for the children who had once
lived there. Parts of this film were photographed over many years, for example the room with the curtain blowing. The film cuts on the action of the curtain’s movement as the room reveals years of physical change. The books in the film are ledgers written by councilors on the daily observations of the children. The Rorschach patterns that have naturally formed in the books remind one of the psychological impacts this institution had on the children detained there. –JS
New Year Sun – Jonathan Schwartz | Brattleboro, VT | 3 min
[AAFF Jury Award]
For listening to the sound of ice thinning with its brightness that comes. –JS
The Florestine Collection – Helen Hill, Paul Gailiunas
South Pasadena, CA | 31 min [AAFF 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.
