49th Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour
With Special Acoustic Performance by Sarah Golden
Friday, March 2, 6PM (music) and 7PM (screening)
Location: Market Square Park, 301 Milam
Free Admission
In partnership with Houston Downtown Management District, Houstonians are invited to bring your lawn chairs and blankets for night of artist-made short films from this internationally recognized film festival, along with a pre-screening musical performance from folk musician Sarah Golden, who recently earned a Contestant spot on NBC’s “The Voice”.
The Ann Arbor Film Festival is the longest-running independent and experimental film festival in North America, established in 1963. Internationally recognized as a premiere forum for independent filmmakers and artists, each year's festival engages audiences with remarkable cinematic experiences. The six-day festival presents 40 programs with more than 180 films from over 20 countries of all lengths and genres, including experimental, animation, documentary, narrative, hybrid and performance based works.
The Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour visits galleries, art house theaters, universities, media arts centers and cinematheques throughout the world, highlighting recent independent and experimental short films from the 49th Ann Arbor Film Festival across all genres: experimental, documentary, animation, narrative and hybrids. The tour provides filmmakers the unique opportunity of having their work screened in front of audiences for whom, in some places, the tour venue is their only access to this form of film art. Each filmmaker participating in the AAFF Tour is also paid for each tour stop, thereby helping to directly support their filmmaking.
About Sarah Golden
Houston Chronicle music critic, Joey Guerra, described the acoustic musical style of Sarah Golden as “accessible” and “effortless”, “highlighted by insightful biographical lyrics”. Born and raised in Houston, Texas, Golden grew up in a family surrounded by music. In addition to playing alongside her brother, member of the award-winning rockabilly band Sean Reefer and the Resin Valley Boys, she has also performed alongside highly regarded idols such as Susan Gibson, Terri Hendrix, Lloyd Maines, Trish Murphy and others. Sarah was a finalist in the Kerrville Folk Festival’s New-Folk Competition (2003); was a semi-finalist, making it to the top 148 performers on the hit television show, “America’s Got Talent”, and auditioned for NBC’s “The Voice” (2012). Watch NBC on Monday nights at 8/7CST to see how she did!
Visitors are encouraged to bring blankets and lawn chairs for this free night of films. Alcohol is not allowed to be brought into the park but beer and wine can be bought at the park’s café Niko Niko’s. Special thanks to Houston Downtown Management District for their support of this program.
Films in this tour program, include:
Miramare - Michaela Müller | Croatia | 8 min
A look at life on the Mediterranean borders of Europe, where tourists try to relax while "illegal" immigrants struggle to get a chance for a better life.
Atlantiques - Mati Diop | Senegal/France | 15 min
Sitting by the campfire, Serigne, a young man from Dakar, tells his two friends the story of his sea voyage as a stowaway. Not only he, but everyone in his surroundings seems to be continually obsessed by the idea of trying to cross the sea. His words reverberate like a melancholic poem. A story about boys who are continually traveling: between past, present and future, between life and death, history and myth.
Protopartículas - Chema García Ibarra | Spain | 7 min
The experiment was almost a success: protomatter exists.
Point Line Plane - Simon Payne | England | 9 min
Shifting grids in black, white and shades of grey plot and continuously reframe screen space. The increasingly complex matrix of layers produces an illusion of depth, beyond the surface of the screen, but with positive and negative switching, the piece also illuminates the viewer.
These Hammers Don't Hurt Us - Michael Robinson | USA | 13 min
[AAFF Most Technically Innovative Film Award]
Tired of underworld and overworld alike, Isis escorts her favorite son on their final curtain call down the Nile, leaving a neon wake of shattered tombs and sparkling sarcophagi. Looking to a future beyond death, Michael Robinson's These Hammers Don't Hurt Us, one of the filmmaker's most sophisticated found footage concoctions yet, combined Michael Jackson's "Remember the Time" music video with footage of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra and roughly a dozen other sources, creating for the late pop star a solemn passage into a bedazzled Egyptian afterlife tenderly ushered by his real-life confidante.
In the Absence of Light, Darkness Prevails - Fern Silva | USA/Brazil | 13 min
[AAFF Best Experimental Film Award]
Fern Silva’s In the Absence of Light, Darkness Prevails suggests a future already arrived, merging the destruction with the creation of life as seen in the tiny turtles crawling their way to the sea, or heard in the crackling of a Geiger counter as a masked man sprays plants with pesticides. Though only 13 minutes, the film’s span is enormous. As revelers in Salvador, Bahia, parade through the streets, a gnat-sized Mercury passes across the surface of the sun, and men slowly make their way up the giant steps of an ancient temple; the film resides in a well of deep time, civilizational history swallowed by the life of the planet.
