Summer in the AAFF Archives
October 26, 2026
Growing up a townie, I’ve had a life-long proximity to the Ann Arbor Film Festival. But I never realized the significance of the institution any more than a kid might realize that the cool-looking bird in their backyard is in fact a rare endangered species. As far as I knew, there was a week in the spring when the Michigan Theater showed a bunch of weird movies—but isn’t the Michigan Theater always showing weird movies?
It wasn’t until my junior year of high school that finally, just for a day, I went to check out what was going on at the AAFF. I think that Saturday made permanent changes to my brain chemistry. Like generations of festival-goers before me, I was thrown headfirst into the visceral awareness that movies could do so much more than I imagined.
But even once I had experienced the expansive possibilities of the festival first-hand, it took distance to make me realize how strange and important this institution really is. I’m now in my senior year of film school at Emerson College in Boston, and the way the film faculty here discuss the festival reinforces the lesson that Ann Arbor is a special—in fact, unique—hub of experimental film exhibition. In the small community of avant-garde cinema, all roads lead to AAFF.
Naturally, when I returned to Ann Arbor for one last summer at home before my senior year of college, I was eager to see how I could get involved with AAFF. When an opportunity arose to dive into festival history as an Archives Intern, I said, “Yes please!”
It turns out that there's a lot to be discovered in the AAFF archives—after all, it’s the oldest experimental film festival running anywhere in the world! Approximately 8,500 films totaling over 300,000 minutes, programmed across 64 seasons and counting, many in competition but also in jury programs, retrospectives, and other special programs of all sorts… that’s a lot of rows in Google Sheets. Yes, we have a Google Sheet with every. single. film—and it is just as overwhelming and awesome as it sounds!
My initial mandate was to update this monster spreadsheet with new data from this year’s 64th season. But this was just the tip of an iceberg that could scrape the bottom of the Atlantic. It turns out a lot of old data needed updating too (a few entries claiming ten-million-minute runtimes were a quick clue that some of our internal record-keeping has had data entry problems). The hope is that this data will one day be tidy enough to debut a public, searchable database of AAFF history.
In the meantime, correcting bygone data entries turned out to be a privilege because it required me to go to the source: old festival programs. These documents, largely held in a paper collection at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library and online via the Ann Arbor District Library, are the not-so-secret keys to all things AAFF.
This was where the real fun began. Recent programs are thick books featuring over a hundred pages of extraordinary graphic design along with rich insights into the films and filmmakers of the season. Older editions are simpler, but no less enjoyable to read: AAFF founder George Manupelli was a graphic artist as well as a filmmaker, and he led his students and co-organizers in crafting eye-catching and unorthodox one-sheet guides for each edition of the festival. In addition to the film titles, runtimes, and schedule, these early programs were decorated with idiosyncratic, often mysterious designs that matched the experimental work projected onscreen.
My favorite discoveries were the little notes from festival organizers included on each year’s sheet, addressing the topics of the day. “WE SUPPORT NON-INTERVENTION IN EL SALVADOR AND NICARAGUA,” proclaims the 19th festival program (1981). “WE ABHOR THE RECENT COUP D’ETAT OF THE GEOGRAPHY DEPARTMENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN BY HAROLD SHAPIRO AND HIS FASCIST CRONIES.” This editorializing is signed with Manupelli’s initials: “—GM.” A few years later, when he was no longer running the festival directly, the 22nd program (1984) welcomes him back with a note of “salutations to George Manupelli: thanks, love, from the Festival to you.”
This openness to the political and personal exists beyond the pages of the programs. This summer, the festival was lucky enough to receive a trove of video material from Julie Meitz, an alum who recorded the day-to-day goings-on of the 42nd AAFF (2004), when current AAFF Executive Director Leslie Raymond was in charge of special programs. Events like the SuperCinematics Parade accompanied the onscreen program with a wealth of off-screen creativity. The hand-crafted costumes and noise-makers of the attendees are better seen and heard than described: you can see Julie’s video here.
In short, the non-commercial, people-driven spirit of the festival is carried through its events and materials as much as through the films themselves. This is not merely the history of the experimental film world, but of Ann Arbor: a time capsule of a university town in the 60s, in an atmosphere where anything seemed possible. I couldn’t help but notice that AAFF’s archival materials, which would surely be of interest to countless institutions devoted to film history, are instead held by local archives—the Bentley, which preserves Michigan history, and the AADL, which is focused on the records of Washtenaw County. It makes me proud to contribute to the festival not only as a film lover, but as an Ann Arborite, and I can’t wait to see what the 65th season and beyond add to this rich legacy. Here’s to the next 8,500 rows of the All Films Programmed spreadsheet!
—Elijah Hatcher-Kay, Summer 2026 Archives Intern
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