REVIEW: 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival

The 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival is a goldmine of ingenuity. Although I only experienced roughly two hours of the weeklong event, I left with a newfound sense of what film could be; film could be a series of ambient noises and fractal images, or a stop-motion documentary comprised completely of graphite drawings. It can be a scene of boredom, commonly overlooked but injected with life as soon as a filmmaker touches it. Held at the Michigan Theatre, which I’ve luckily been able to visit a few times for other movie screenings, the Ann Arbor Film Festival’s diverse crowd complimented the extravagance of the theatre’s gilded ceilings, the environment glowing with quiet excitement. Special screenings at the Michigan Theatre always bring a niche crowd of enthusiasts, but this mingling group of filmmakers and film-goers added another dimension of community.

Although I’d planned on seeing A Lantern Through Your Labyrinth: Out Histories of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, schedule changes led me to see the screening just afterward, Films in Competition 6. I entered the theatre with no expectations except to embrace the bizarre. The Films in Competition 6 didn’t seem to have any common theme or genre tying them together, and the variety was electrifying. About a dozen short films were screened one after the other, ranging from two to twenty minutes. They were tales of heartbreak, death, connection, and experimentation. Some were animated, others filmed in bizarre ways with extended shots and unconventional angles. I found that some of them were tediously drawn-out, while others were deeply moving and opened my eyes to new methods of storytelling.

My favorite short film of the night was Life is a Particle Time is a Wave by Daniel Zvereff. The stop-motion film is illustrated with what looks to be charcoal or graphite on white paper, dense lines telling the tale of a widowed old man floating through the rest of his repetitive and lonesome days. The clever sound design is entrancingly ambient, a steady ticking conveying a complicated relationship with time and the slow march toward death. The motif of time is symbolized in the minimal but effective illustrations— of the man repeatedly fixing his watch, of the ominous clock above him, and of his worn-down face. His brush with death sends the film into a fresh segment that is much more experimental. The screen explodes into surreal designs that flow into each other, smudging and warping to evoke the in-between feeling of a chaotic purgatory. The experience is heartwarming, saddening, and utterly human, masterfully speaking to fundamental human experiences in the span of a few minutes.

After the screenings, a few of the filmmakers took to the stage for a Q&A, allowing the community to connect on a personal level with passionate creators. The “festival” part of “film festival” revealed itself more through this degree of interactivity; it was a group celebration, each person a part of the joyous experience, whether they create or just observe. It is a wholly equal appreciation for art in every form.

Life is a Particle Time is a Wave is just one of the hundreds of mind-bending films in the competition. Knowing I can’t possibly see all of them is a bit saddening, but good news: the best of the best will be shown on Sunday! Award-winning films will be chosen by the jurors and screened to the Ann Arbor public, so grab an $8 student ticket and check it out!

PREVIEW: 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival

Nestled into the predictable hustle-and-bustle of a Midwest college town, nearly swallowed by the indifference of overworked students, March Madness, and the encroaching doom of finals, a week-long event brings a lucky glimpse of worldwide talent to Michigan Theatre. The Ann Arbor Film Festival is the oldest experimental and avant-garde film festival in North America, reaching all the way back to 1963.  Each year, thousands of film submissions compete for less than two hundred spots in the six-day event. As prestigious of an honor it is to even secure a spot in the lineup, AAFF competitors are even eligible to qualify for Academy Awards, illuminating a world of possibility beyond the big screens. This showcase of creative talent annually sets up shop in our own backyard at the Michigan Theatre, so why not make the walk to witness a couple of hours of rare genius? The week of film screenings extends from March 22nd to the 27th; each day features a schedule of special screenings and “Films in Competition” that compete for awards. The festival wraps up on Sunday with screenings of the winning films. Attendees can choose from a range of events to attend, from experimental shorts to animated features and grim documentaries. There’s something for everyone at AAFF.

I am attending the third night of film screenings on Thursday the 24th, specifically the special program titled A Lantern Through Your Labyrinth: Out Histories of the Ann Arbor Film Festival. This program focuses on experimental LGBTQ cinema throughout the film festival’s history; going into this with very little knowledge of the film festival or its queer artists, I hope to be enlightened about the intersectionality of film and its role in this distinguished event.

Student tickets are only $8 for any event of your choice! Find more information, buy tickets, and view the full schedule at https://www.aafilmfest.org/.

REVIEW: Ann Arbor Film Festival, The Room Presumed

I attended one of the free performances put on by the 2021 Ann Arbor Film Festival, The Room Presumed by Scott Kiernan. Just from the description on the Ann Arbor Film Festival website, I wasn’t quite sure what I was watching exactly, but I was intrigued by the idea of watching something created with machine learning. 

In this piece, trippy visuals set on the backdrop of a black screen are accompanied by text that appears sentence by sentence. When the performance began, I was unsure of when the “real” performance would start and assumed I was seeing human-written words appear on my screen. My confusion deepened when at random points, the script would suddenly make no sense, or repeat phrases, and then return to a seemingly “normal” cadence.

If you’ve ever played around with artificial intelligence (AI) poem generators or AI meme generators (This Meme Does Not Exist), you might recognize these glitches as trademark giveaways of tech-created text. Or perhaps it’s just an innate disposition to be able to tell when something just doesn’t sound human. Once it fully clicked that this was probably a machine-written script, I couldn’t tell if I was more disturbed or less disturbed by it.

I crashed the day’s afterparty for the Ann Arbor Film Festival on gather.town, which I had never been on–a site where participants are avatars, and your proximity to other avatars determines how much you can see or hear them. I accidentally found myself in an AAFF director chat before I found Scott Kiernan’s group and joined the conversation about what that piece really was about. 

The script we experience in The Room Presumed is created by a machine learning algorithm partially trained on an early 1980’s thought experiment at Atari. During this experiment, Kiernan explained, computer scientists at Atari imagined the possibilities of virtual reality, but without the tools to do it, resorted to improvisational acting.  

The end result of this machine learning script, as Kiernan explained, is to make fun of what we call immersion and reveal how non-immersive VR can be. As homage to this original thought experiment, at the end of the performance there flashes a picture of the Atari building today, an unmarked, bland corporate building. 

This piece caused me to truly think about my relationship to reality and to technology, and reminded me of an article I read about AI-”created” art. While an AI can turn out surprisingly humanlike (and disturbingly un-humanlike) pieces, what it creates is always going to be based off of the human-created content it is fed, yet that doesn’t in turn make an AI piece human-created. In a similar way, VR will always be a tech-warped version of our true reality, and therefore, as Kiernan pushes us to see, it cannot be truly immersive.

REVIEW: The 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival — Films in Competition 7: Animation

Another year of the incredible Ann Arbor Film Festival and another year of incredible films. And I have the great honor and pleasure of sharing the night of Films in Competition 7: Animation.

As any AAFF enthusiast and animator knows, animation brings inanimate characters to life. That can be anything between 2-dimensional drawing, stop-motion photos, claymation, 3D modeling, or maybe even any wild combination of them! Animation is a constantly growing and changing field in the film industry, and we can always trust technology and innovative animators to find new ways to impress and wow the audience with never before seen styles of animation.

The 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival showcased a series of remarkable new animations for the audience. As the official website phrased it, “Ten recent animated films from near and far, featuring an artificial intelligence with the affective capacities of a kitten, memories of the ‘birds and the bees’ talk, a suburban woman who can’t stop growing fingers, a mother’s alcohol addiction, the most notorious women’s prison in East Germany, broken dolls and boiling stew, screen obsession and more.”

Friday night, I walked into the Michigan Theater with a friend. And having arrived a tad bit late, we were greeted by a packed theater of fellow film enthusiasts. We managed to spot seats on the balcony and found ourselves under the gaze of a cat on the big screen — Kitty AI.

Artificial Intelligence for Governance: Al the Kitty is an animation directed by Pinar Yoldas with the official description: “It is year 2039. An artificial intelligence with the affective capacities of a kitten becomes the first non-human governor. She leads a politician-free zone with a network of Artificial Intelligences. She lives in mobile devices of the citizens and can love up to 3 Million people.”

In other words, AI the Kitty is a computerized cat governor destined for greatness. As messy as politics can be, AI the Kitty assures the audience of her efficiency and equity, promising that she herself is far too intelligent for the chaotic nature of politics and that her level of professionalism in her field of expertise was no laughing matter. I was definitely convinced.

Artificial Intelligence for Governance: Al the Kitty is an animation that felt a little like propaganda for a kitty campaign, but as if I would ever object to that!

The following feature was a 9-minute animation directed by Alain Delannoy, called “The Talk” True Stories About The Birds And The Bees. The title did a pretty good job of describing the short film. It was just as the title advertised: a group of people discuss their experiences with their parents when they first had “the talk.”

Fun, entertaining, and hilarious, “The Talk” True Stories About The Birds And The Bees circles the topic of sex with honesty and humor. It definitely questions the humility of the subject, addressing the fact that although we as a society are embarrassed to talk about it, we accept sex to be a “normal” part of life, something that humans do in order to reproduce. Simple biology. And yet, the way parents go about teaching their children always winds up on a whole new level of crazy, ridiculous, and unnecessarily embarrassing.

Up next on the screen was director Matt Reynolds’s Hot Dog Hands, a 7-minute animation following the woes of a woman tormented for her — you guessed it — hot dog hands. This woman grows fingers at an exponential rate, and even her arms are consumed by the growing number of fingers, making her unable to use them for anything and rendering her opposable thumbs useless. The fact that this woman is pink like raw hot dogs probably didn’t help her situation either.

Pushing the boundaries of body horror, the animation is definitely not for the faint of heart. Although it is brightly colored and playful, the mischief and playfulness in color and style is juxtaposed with disturbing acts of cannibalism that take place later in the film. Of course, Hot Dog Hands Lady does end up finding happiness, by losing her fingers to the mailbox-living-underground-cannibals who desperately need to feed on her fingers to sustain themselves. As a result, Hot Dog Hands Lady loses her unwanted fingers and is worshipped by the Hot-Dog-Hands-eaters who are able to sustain themselves off her regenerating fingers. And they lived happily ever after.

After that, was Whatever the Weather, a 12-minute animation directed by Remo Scherrer. In contrast to the animation that preceded it, Whatever the Weather carried a much darker, more solemn, and somber tone. Set in black and white, the animation is driven by the play between negative and positive space, using one and the other to create depth and shadow in the characters on the screen. The lack of solidity in the animation reiterates the theme of the narration: a child’s troubles beset by her alcoholic mother.

As it is summarized on the website, “Wally’s childhood is increasingly turned upside down by her mother’s alcohol addiction. She experiences the excesses and consequences of addiction first hand. Desperately, the eight-year-old tries to keep up normality in her own life and the life of her family by any means. A roller coaster ride between helplessness, excessive demands and desperation begins. It’s a daily struggle for survival.”

Following this somber telling of Wally’s childhood, was Lauren Cook’s TRANS/FIGURE/GROUND, a 5-minute animation: “Painted 16mm film undergoes a monstrous transformation becoming neither analog nor digital. A film about uncanny valleys and the space between.”

Without definitive characters or voices, Lauren Cook’s TRANS/FIGURE/GROUND becomes strictly visual and compelling. The entire animation thrums and the entire theater tremors to the pulsing sounds of this animation, which forces the disorientation in the audience to become innate and charged with emotion.

With four films left for the night, next was a dreary and somber 7-minute animation called Broken – The Women’s Prison at Hoheneck, which shares the story of political inmates Gabriele Stoetzer and Birgit Willschuetz at Hoheneck Castle, the most notorious women’s prison in East Germany. As the official website says, “Their story is one of overcrowded cells, despotic hierarchies, ruthless everydays, and the enduring effects of incarceration. Most of all, however, it is about the crushing pressure of forced labour. Prisoners at Hoheneck manufactured millions of pantyhose, bed sheets, and other products for West German retailers, bringing enormous profits to both sides of the Iron Curtain. Part of the young animadoc tradition, the seven-minute film pairs original audio interview extracts with abstract, monochrome animation.”

Edge of Alchemy comes onto the screen after it. A 19-minute animated collage directed by Stacey Steers, “Edge of Alchemy is the third film in a trilogy examining women’s inner worlds. In this handmade film, constructed from over 6,500 collages, the actors Mary Pickford and Janet Gaynor are seamlessly appropriated from their early silent features and cast into a surreal epic with an upending of the Frankenstein story and an undercurrent of hive collapse.”

“Surreal” and “Frankenstein” are the two best words to describe the world of Edge of Alchemy. Although I was out of context and had no clue about the other two films in the trilogy, Edge of Alchemy definitely delivers a world of intrigue, science, and bees. Scientist Lady brings Bee Lady to life, much like in the classic tale of Frankenstein.

The night of animation ends on a fun note in the form of two short and sweet 5-minute films.

First is Batfish Soup by Amanda Bonaiuto, a short story that is a little too relatable about relatives coming over to visit. As it is summarized in the official website, “Wacky relatives give way to mounting tensions with broken dolls, boiling stew and a bang.” Very, very wacky, Batfish Soup definitely proves itself to be entertaining and weird, in the best way possible.

Last but not least, swiPed! Directed by David Chai, swiPed is a fun take on the modern age’s obsession with smartphones and tablets. It’s cute, short, and playful, poking fun at everyone’s inability to stay apart from our devices. Equally as funny is its playful summary: “Texters texting, tweeters tweeting, likers liking, posters posting, Googlers Googling, Amazonians Amazoning, webheads surfing, snappers chatting, pinnters pinning, tubers tubing, tenders tindering, Netflixers chilling – are we binging too much? More connected than ever, but more distant by the day. Is humanity being swiped away?”

All in all, another year of the incredible Ann Arbor Film Festival and another year of incredible films.