ANNOUNCING THE 51ST AAFF JURY
Laida Lertxundi is a filmmaker, programmer and lecturer at University of California San Diego. Her films made with non-professional actors evoke intimate spaces both external and internal. Filled with intricate arrangements of actions and sounds, her work explores how filmic moments can be imbued with emotional resonance. Her cinema questions how viewers’ desires and expectations are shaped by cinematic forms of storytelling. She searches for alternative ways of linking sound and music with found locales, constructed situations, and quotidian environments. Shot in and around Los Angeles, her films map a geography transformed by affective and subjective states.
Her films have been shown internationally in museums, festivals and venues such as MoMA; Tate Modern (London); Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Viennale (Austria); the New York Film Festival Views from the Avant Garde; the International Film Festival Rotterdam; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid); Anthology Film Archives and many more. She was recently featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial.
Lertxundi received the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 48th Ann Arbor Film Festival. She was included in Best of the Decade reviews in CinemaScope Magazine and 25 Filmmakers for the 21st Century in The Film Comment Avant-Garde Poll. She has programmed film and video at venues in the U.S. and Spain, and has published various articles on film, most recently in the anthology La Risa Oblicua and Bostezo magazine.
Marcin Gizycki is an art and film historian, critic, photographer, filmmaker and senior lecturer at Rhode Island School of Design. He is an expert at the Polish Film Institute as well as the founder and Artistic Director of the Animator International Animated Film Festival in Poznan, Poland. His work includes documentary, experimental, and animated films. Gizycki has curated numerous film programs for international venues including the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Museum of Cinematography (Torino), and the Centre Pompidou (Paris).
Gizycki has published over 300 essays, papers, and articles on art and film; his books include: Avant-Garde and Cinema: Film in Polish Avant-Garde Circles Between the Wars (1996), Disney Was Not the Only One (2000), The End and What Next? Essays on Postmodernism, Contemporary Art, and the End of the Century (2001), Dictionary of Movements and Key Notions of Art of the 2nd Half of the 20th Century (2002), and Wenders Go Home! (2006).
Kevin Jerome Everson is currently an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. With a sense of place and historical research, Everson’s films combine scripted and documentary moments with rich elements of formalism. They focus on gestures or tasks caused by certain conditions in the lives of working class African Americans and other people of African descent.
He has completed five feature films and more than 70 short films in addition to paintings, sculpture, site-specific installations and photographs. Everson was featured in the 2008 and 2012 Whitney Biennials as well as a major retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 2011. Everson has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, NEA, NEH, Ohio Arts Council and the Virginia Museum, an American Academy Rome Prize, grants from Creative Capital and the Mid-Atlantic, residencies at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Yaddo and MacDowell Colony, and numerous university fellowships. Everson was named an Alpert Award recipient in 2012.
His artwork and films have been exhibited internationally at museums and art institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Museum of Modern Art (NY); REDCAT (Los Angeles); Cleveland Museum of Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); Armand Hammer Museum (Los Angeles); The Wexner Center of the Arts (Columbus, Ohio); and the Whitechapel Gallery (London); among others.
Everson’s films have screened at many international film festivals including the Sundance Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, AFI Film Festival, (Los Angeles), Athens International Film Festival (Ohio), Courtisane Festival (Belgium), CPH:DOX (Copenhagen), and the Media City Film Festival (Windsor, Ontario) among many others.
Everson has had several films shown over the past 15 years at the Ann Arbor Film Festival including the film Eleven Eighty-Two (1997) which won the Peter Wilde Award for Technical Innovation.
