It is screening season at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. This is the time when we devote ourselves to reviewing the hundreds of film submissions that have arrived on our doorstep. We are grateful to accept this honor for the 58th time and thrilled to regard the fruits of so much creative labor. It is reassuring to witness the profusion of creative processing during these times of political uncertainty. Reflecting on the contemporary moment, articulating concerns and questions,

Filmmakers Emma Piper-Burket (Driving Dinosaurs, 2019), second from right, and LNZ Arturo (2MissedCalls and <3, both 2017), far right, enjoy a March 2019 Off the Screen! installation hosted by the Ann Arbor Art Center, an AAFF community partner. The installation is Chorus for Untrained Operator by Stephan Moore and Peter Bussigel. [Photo by Bree Andruzzi] The Ann Arbor Film Festival gets much more from the town it calls home than just a name. The festival wouldn’t be what it

On Friday, October 18, the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs (MCACA) announced an award of $22,500 in operational support for the Ann Arbor Film Festival (AAFF) for the 2020 funding cycle. Of the total award, $2,360 consists of federal funds provided to the Council by the National Endowment for the Arts. At its October 18 council meeting, MCACA announced that $9.6 million in grants would be awarded statewide during this fiscal year. Washtenaw County received the

After learning about the Ann Arbor Film Festival just a year prior to having two of her works included in the 57th annual event, London-based filmmaker Katharine Fry sat down for an interview to discuss these works. The video installation, Before her investiture, the novice must hear what she has to, learn what she has to, shape what she has to, say was part of the Off the Screen! program. According to Fry’s description of her work in the program guide of the 57th festival: “

Join us at the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Graduate Library Gallery for a one-time showing of short film highlights from the early days of the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Founded in 1963, the Ann Arbor Film Festival is the oldest avant-garde and experimental film festival in North America. And since its earliest days, the festival has promoted bold, visionary filmmakers, advancing the art of film and engaging the community with remarkable cinematic experiences. This program

El Mar La Mar masterfully weaves together sublime 16mm shots of nature and weather phenomena, animals, people, and the tracks they leave behind with a polyphonic soundtrack, creating a cinematographic exploration of the desert habitat, a multifaceted panorama of a highly politicized stretch of land, a film poem that conjures up the ocean. — Hanna Keller, writing for the Forum Expanded catalog of the 2017 Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin El Mar La Mar opens with a long imp

For almost a century, the Ann Arbor Art Center’s annual All Media Exhibition has showcased works of diverse media by artists from the American Midwest. This year Ann Arbor Film Festival Director Leslie Raymond was selected to serve as a juror for the 97th annual exhibition. As the only juror for this year’s exhibition, Raymond reviewed all of the entries and selected the ones to be exhibited in the program. “It was an honor to review this work and a challenge to whittle it do

When filmmaker LNZ Arturo came to the 57th Ann Arbor Film Festival this past March, she sat down for an interview with the festival, which would soon screen two of her recent works: a feature-length visual album made for the Internet, <3 (an emoticon heart); and the short film 2Missed Calls. “You could argue it’s an album release instead of a film screening,” she says. LNZ describes <3 as 13 tracks forming a loosely woven narrative that traverses three psychological spaces: w