We Love our Community Partners
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 is without the outstanding support of the greater Ann Arbor community—including the support of our community partners.
Who are these community partners? Well, each year we team up with about 20 different local organizations—from WCBN and the Ann Arbor Art Center to the Michigan Psychoanalytic Society and beyond—to help spread the word about our unique slice of Ann Arbor. The main thing that all of these partners have in common is that we think that they are each doing great things to help keep Ann Arbor and the surrounding area the strong, beautiful, and distinctive community that it is.
With so many people coming to Ann Arbor for the week of the festival, we see it as a chance to bring their attention to these organizations. At the same time, our partners help spread the word about our festival through their own networks, which can lead to many new and exciting relationships.
Because of the open-ended nature of the partnerships, they can take many different shapes and forms. For example, the Ann Arbor Art Center has been a longtime partner with the festival. The center not only promotes the festival as a community partner but also joins forces with us to present some of our Off The Screen! Installations and events, as seen in the photo above.
We are always open to engaging with potential new community partners, and we enjoy the process of thinking outside of the box on ways we can work together. If you are part of an organization or group with an interest in talking with us about a potential community partnership, or if you’d like a bit more information about the ways these partnerships can work, please reach out to me at marin@aafilmfest.org. I look forward to hearing from you!
