RULES AND TERMS
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The Ann Arbor Film Festival is open to experimental films as well as films that demonstrate a high regard for the moving image as an experimental art form, no matter the genre. Each year the AAFF selects 100-145 shorts and features for exhibition in the awards competition portion of the festival.
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Films previously submitted may not be re-entered unless there has been a significant change to the edit. Later versions of a film may be reviewed and/or selected at the programmer's discretion.
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Short and feature-length entries are accepted.
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Short films run no longer than 60 minutes. Feature films run 60 minutes or more.
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Entries not in English should have English subtitles.
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Works in progress may be submitted, but are juried in the same pool as all other submissions.
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Work must be contemporary - completed within the last three years.
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Entry fees are per film entered, and must accompany the entry form for confirmation. Entry fees are non-refundable.
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Make checks and money orders payable to the Ann Arbor Film Festival.
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The Ann Arbor Film Festival does not give waivers or discounts.
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Entries are accepted via secure online screening and 16mm only. We do not accept DVD, VHS or video data files for screening purposes.
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16MM
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If you would like the festival to preview a 16mm print of your film, please contact the festival directly at submissions@aafilmfest.org to make arrangements.
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LIBRE
Throughout the six-day festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival offers a range of free events designed to welcome the entire community. Juror Programs and Off the Screen events are open to the public at no cost—making it easy for everyone to experience bold, boundary-pushing film and engage with artists from around the world.
Juror Programs
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Every year the AAFF invites three distinguished artists to jury and confer awards to deserving films and filmmakers. This year, the jury consists of Sabine Gruffat, Elysa Wendi, and Jeremy Speed Schwartz. Each of the three jurors will also present a specially curated program of their own work during the festival.
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Wednesday 3/25 | 3pm | Michigan Theatre Screening Room
Sabine Gruffat | Beyond Resolution: Films By Sabine Gruffat
​This series of films favors ambiguity and resists resolution. The nearer the gaze, the more obscure the view. Illegibility here is not an escape from politics, but a way of inhabiting it differently: as a site of tension, friction, and possibility. These films draw from a range of genres and layered techniques. Images are processed to draw attention to the hidden logics in software, hardware, and materiality. In repurposing media, the works call attention to the histories from which meaning’s fragile frameworks emerge.
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Thursday, 3/26 | 3pm | Michigan Theatre Screening Room
Elysa Wendi | Hybrid Motion
Running the gamut of hybrid documentary, speculative portraiture, interpretive romance, and improvisational works, Hybrid Motion is a series of creative encounters and collaborations between dance artists and filmmakers from Singapore and Hong Kong. In this interdisciplinary discourse, the films explore dialogues between construction and spontaneity, calculation and instinct, camera and body, as well as art and life.
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Friday, 3/27 | 1pm | Michigan Theatre Screening Room
Jeremy Speed Schwartz | Directions and Abstractions
This program surveys Jeremy Speed Schwartz’s personal explorations in animation through works that chart a course between abstraction, narrative, and play. The films presented span from early 2000s stop-motion and pixilation to recent hand-drawn digital animations, tending to collect around several themes: abstract pieces that create structure through growing and expanding complexity in motion; personal narratives addressing relationships and gender expression; and works created in collaboration with the League of Imaginary Scientists that are playful, surrealist, and full of ’Pataphysical humor.
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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. Off The Screen also includes panel discussions, workshops, and presentations by friends and artists of the Ann Arbor Film Festival.
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OTS PERFORMANCE
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Friday, 3/27 | 7:30pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium | ticket required
Devotional Signals~ | Eric Souther
This live cinema performance begins the FIC 7 screening, with the materiality of signal shaped live through gesture and spatial motion.
Eric Souther holds an MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. His creative research draws from a multiplicity of disciplines, including new materialism, deep time, and toolmaking. Souther is an assistant professor of kinetic imaging in the Gwen Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University.
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OTS SALONS
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Thursday 3/26 | 10:30-11:30am | Third Mind Books
I've Created a Monster: Generative AI, Found Footage Filmmaking, and the Archive Effect
Join filmmaker Jennifer Proctor as she discusses her process of remaking Bruce Conner’s 1958 experimental collage film A Movie using only generative AI tools. She will address the ethical and ontological questions this approach raises, examining how generative AI erodes what scholar Jamie Baron terms the “archive effect.” Proctor’s new film, AI Movie, screens as part of Shorts in Competition 1 on opening night of the Ann Arbor Film Festival on Tuesday, March 26 at 8pm.
Jennifer Proctor is an award-winning filmmaker, film scholar, and associate professor of journalism and media production at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
Saturday 3/28 | 11am-1:30pm | Michigan Theater Grand Foyer
The Joy of LOOPing by Pickle Fort Film Collective
This interactive, Montessori-style workshop (all materials provided) will teach participants how to create their own hand-painted and hand-inked 16mm film loops on clear film leader. Upon completion, loops will be projected on the Michigan Theater screen so that creators can enjoy their finished pieces.
The workshop will be facilitated by Sean Kenny and members of the Pickle Fort Film Collective (Grand Rapids, MI), an arts organization that specializes in creating handmade 16mm films with live, improvised sound.
Sunday 3/29 |10:30–11:30am | U-M Modern Languages Building 2
What the Hell Was That? | Moderated by Daniel Herbert
This panel discussion has been an Ann Arbor Film Festival favorite for more than a decade. It began when a filmmaker overheard an audience member declare, “What the hell was that?” after viewing his film. An enlightening discussion ensued, and the idea for the panel was born. Join visiting filmmakers and other special guests for an opportunity to watch and discuss three short experimental films selected from this year’s festival lineup. Daniel Herbert is a media scholar and a professor in the U-M Department of Film, Television, and Media.
OTS INSTALLATIONS AT THE MICHIGAN THEATER
Wednesday 3/25 through Friday 3/27
Planting Disabled Futures: a virtual reality ritual
Petra Kuppers | Ypsilanti, MI | 2026 | 360 VR
This crip intimacy installation/community performance invites you into a world of healing plants cultivated by disabled peoples’ embodied ways of knowing. Come, try out a headset, hold a plushy critter, and become entangled with the ways we as disabled people honor and engage with plant elders. We use live performance approaches and virtual reality technologies to share environmental connection and energy, creaturely liveliness and ongoingness, crip joy and experiences of pain.
Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist who uses somatics, performance, visual art, media, and speculative poetry to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. She was a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and teaches at the University of Michigan.
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Saturday 3/28 and Sunday 3/29
Is The War Close?
Joseph Andrew Sywenkyj | Ann Arbor, MI | 2026 | 360 VR
Is the War Close? is an immersive room-scale virtual reality documentary experience that places the user in a Kyiv home at night during a large Russian drone and missile attack. Utilizing gaming technology and spatial audio, this work allows the user to move around the scene freely in six degrees of freedom, as if they are truly there. This VR experience is based on real-life events. Directed by Joseph Sywenkyj.
Joseph Sywenkyj is a documentary and breaking news visual journalist working with lens-based and immersive XR technology. He is currently the Howard R. Marsh Visiting Professor of Journalism in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan.
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Change Variable Vacillations
Noel Stupek | Fennimore, WI | 2026 | mixed media
Pay Attention, Wake Up, Take Action, Join In, Stand Up. We see these words a lot lately. Why not tune in your valuable attention? Many of the components in this installation were decorated in collaboration with the Ann Arbor community through a partnership with the Ann Arbor District Library. Noel Stupek is an installation artist, arts enthusiast, and collaboration lover.
What We Saw
Everyone | Ann Arbor, MI | 2026 | social sculpture, analog social media
Blank cards are provided for you—the audience—to write down what you observe at the festival, onscreen and off. Leave your card in the box provided at the What We Saw station to be photographed and added to the ongoing slideshow. This presentation is an experimental remix documentary made possible by you: the savvy, diverse, and experimental-film-loving AAFF audience. All are invited and encouraged to participate!