52ND AAFF AUDIENCE AWARD WINNERS

We are very pleased to announce that the 52nd Ann Arbor Film Festival Audience Awards ($250 each) go to Ja’Tovia Gary for Cakes Da Killa: NO HOMO and Zbigniew Czapla for Toto.

Cakes Da Killa: NO HOMO is Ja’Tovia Gary’s electrifying portrait of Cakes Da Killa (born Rashard Bradshaw), a 22 year old hip hop artist and openly gay man whose provocative lyrics explore sexuality and gender politics.

Ja’Tovia Gary is a visual artist and performer from Dallas, Texas currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work conjures the aesthetics of AfroSurrealism, and confronts traditional notions surrounding representation and identity through video art, documentary film, and installation, with the concept of Black female subjectivity as a point of departure. Gary is an MFA student at the School of Visual Arts where she is currently in production on her graduate thesis, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, an experimental autobiographical film which employs non linear filmmaking techniques while interrogating notions of the self, Black American religious traditions, family, nostalgia and psychoanalysis.

Please visit jatovia.com to see more of Gary's work.

Zbigniew Czapla’s animated film Toto depicts “a universal story about naiveté and irreversibly lost childhood dreams.” Hand-painted frame by frame with ink and acyclic, Toto is one of several films by Polish artist Zbigniew Czapla who is based in Kraków, where he works as a screenwriter, director, animator, painter and graphic artist. Czapla is a graduate of the Graphic Arts Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, and is a scholar of Ellizabeth Greenshields Foundation (Canada), DAAD (Germany) and Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. He is a member or International Animated Film Society ASIFA. Toto has screened in seventy festivals worldwide and has received 10 awards.

Please visit zbigniewczapla.pl to see more of Czapla's work.