48th Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour – 16mm Program
Co-presented with the Museum of Fine Arts Houston
Saturday, January 15, 7PM
Location: Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Brown Auditorium, 1001 Bissonnet Street
$7 general public, $6 MFAH and Aurora members, seniors, students.
Tickets available in advance at www.mfah.org
"The AAFF has been at the forefront of experimental and avant-garde programming for decades and... audiences appreciated the opportunity to see the latest work from both leading and emerging independent filmmakers."
-- Florence Almozini, Director of Programming, BAMcinmatek, NYC
Aurora Picture Show and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, collaborate to present the 48th Ann Arbor Film Festival's 16mm Film Program on Saturday, January 15 at 7 p.m. in the Museum of Fine Arts Brown Auditorium, 1001 Bissonnet. .
This year's Ann Arbor Film Festival 16mm program offers a rare opportunity to see a variety of contemporary new works projected in this high-quality format. Included on the tour are internationally esteemed experimental filmmakers, renowned animators and many emerging artists. The program includes Jim Trainor's "The Presentation Theme" (Winner of the Stan Brakhage Film at Wit's End award), as well as Robert Todd's "Golden Hour" (Winner of the No Violence Award 48th AAFF), Denise Oleksijczuk's "Role", Steve Cossman's "TUSSLEMUSCLE", Alexandra Cuesta's "Piensa en Mi", Naoyuki Tsuj's "Zephyr", Peter Herwitz's "Gesturings", Gregory Godhard's "Collide-a-Scope", and Laida Lertxundi's "My Tears Are Dry".
The Ann Arbor Film Festival is the longest running independent and experimental film festival in North America, internationally recognized as a premier forum for film as an art form. The AAFF receives more than 2,500 submissions annually from over than 60 countries and serves as one of a handful of Academy Award-qualifying festivals in the United States.
MORE ON THE FILMS INCLUDED IN THIS PROGRAM:
Role
Denise Oleksijczuk | Vancouver, Canada | 9 minutes [U.S. premiere at 48th AAFF]
Based on a reconsideration of Robert Bresson’s 1967 film Mouchette (after Georges Bernanos’ 1937 novella of the same name), this film presents a new end to the story. Casting herself as a grown-up Mouchette, the director reinterpret’s Bresson’s depiction of a child’s impoverished solitude, her Christ-like suffering, and the ultimate control she assumes in her own drowning. In Role, Oleksijczuk reframes Bresson’s infamous suicide scene as a clumsy experiment rather than a transcendent release.
TUSSLEMUSCLE
Steve Cossman | Brooklyn, NY | 5 minutes [World premiere at 48th AAFF]
The work presented explores humanity’s ecological relationship and the ritual of restoration. The violent pulse speaks with a sense of urgency and chaotic struggle, while the hypnotic arrangement keeps us in blinding awe to its condition. This dynamically animated piece is composed of 7,000 single frames which were appropriated/‘recycled’ from view-master reel cells and hand-spliced to create a linear filmstrip. Original score by Jacob Long. – S.C.
Piensa en Mi
Alexandra Cuesta | USA/Ecuador | 15 minutes [Jury Award 48th AAFF]
Moving from east to west and back, the windows of a bus frame fleeting sections of urban landscape. Throughout the day, images of riders, textures of light and fragments of bodies in space come together to weave a portrait in motion; a contemplative meditation on public transport in the city of Los Angeles. Isolation, routine and everyday splendor, create the backdrop of this journey, while the intermittent sounds of cars construct the soundscape.
Zephyr
Naoyuki Tsuj | Yokohama, Japan | 6 minutes
Continuing from where Tsuji’s charcoal animation The Place Where We Were leaves off, “Zephyr refers to the Greek god of the west wind. Zephyr in Tsuji’s work comes to a baby and takes the baby into the inside of the sun. What kind of experience is waiting for the baby?”—Tomio Koyama Gallery, Kyoto
Gesturings
Peter Herwitz | Ann Arbor, MI | 7 minutes [World premiere at 48th AAFF]
This film represents the apotheosis of my handpainted film style and the belief that in the materiality of film everything is a kind of gesture: color, rhythm, texture, splice marks, funky tape splices, fingerprints, and dirt. I worked on and off on the film for seven years. Reprinting each frame twice, my hope was the slowing down would echo Baudelaire's 'Lux, Calme, et Volupte' (luxury, calm and pleasure). The film is dedicated to Bill Brand. -P.H.
The Presentation Theme
Jim Trainor | Chicago, IL | 14 minutes [The Stan Brakhage Film at Wit's End Award]
A Peruvian prisoner of war finds himself outmaneuvered by a hematophagous priestess. Based on a true story. - J.T.
Collide-a-Scope
Gregory Godhard | Sydney, Australia | 3 minutes
On the 10th September 2008, in the city of Cern,Switzerland, physicists began experiments using the most powerful ‘atom-smasher’ ever built, the Large Hadron Collider. In these experiments, scientists hoped to find the theoretical Higgs-Boson Particle, the so called ‘God Particle’. This film contains secret footage of those results. -G.G.
Golden Hour
Robert Todd | Boston, MA | 17 min [No Violence Award 48th AAFF | World premiere 48th AAFF]
What if the Looking Glass were, at the same time, a window and a mirror, if the window was the mirror, the mirror the window? And your projection through this transparent/reflective plane brings you to a world that is as externally rich as the self, with its internal churnings shifting through dark and light, directs it to be – the self and the world open to each other, if but for a moment? And that window offers itself to you as a space in your life, held shimmering in your being and your vision throughout that sustaining moment, that golden hour. - R.T.
My Tears Are Dry
Laida Lertxundi | SPAIN/USA | 4 minutes [Most Promising Filmmaker Award 48th AAFF]
A film in the three parts of a dialectic. Hoagy Land’s song is played and interrupted as guitar makes sound, two women, a bed, an armchair, and the beautiful outside. The lyrics of the song reference the eternal sunshine of California and its promises.—L.L.
