Schedule:

Tuesday, March 21, 2023

6:30pm: Opening Night Party - Michigan Theater Grand Foyer

Celebrate the first night of the festival with drinks and food generously provided by Ann Arbor area businesses including Ann Arbor Distilling Company, Bigalora, Bløm, Carlyle Grill, Dalat, Everest Sherpa, Frita Batidos, Havana Island BBQ and Tapas, Mothfire Brewing Co., Side Biscuit, Teahaus, Vinology, and more. DJ set by Alvin Hill, and open bar. A ticket to Films in Competition 1 is included in the price of admission.

8:15 PMFilms in Competition 1 - Main Theater - Michigan Theater

Grasshopper
Language Unknown
To Do
Aralkum
Glazing
Eclipsis
Diomysus
11

Wednesday, March 22, 2023

1:00 PM: Koyo Yamashita Stories Buried and Unburied - The State Theatre

Flos Pavonis
Trinity
Mud Man

5:00 PM: Burial - The State Theatre

A python slithers and curls over the abandoned control room of Chernobyl’s sister, the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, its radioactive core an unleashed monster that will slither through time for a million years. From Etruscan ruins and sunken cities to the most modern of underground repositories, director Emilija Škarnulyte follows our attempts to bury the immortal. Addressing the epochal effects of nuclear technology on all levels, Burial follows the cycle of power, an eternal return, another serpent eating its tail..

5:30 PM: Films in Competition 2 - Main Theater - Michigan Theater

Roses, Pink and Blue
South Los Angeles Street
Arrest in Flight
Mangrove School
Camera Test
2cent / 10coil
No Thoughts Head Empty

7:00 PM: Diòba - The State Theatre

Elba is an indigenous woman who has lost her roots. She is 63 years old and lives alone in a humble peasant house located inside a forest. She spends her days between her house and the forest. She fulfills her needs partially with what she finds along the paths she takes every day through the woods, that is where she gets seeds and plants. Elba is a hermit consumed by her own life. She lives obsessed with a picture hanging in her room; a photo of an indigenous girl on the day of her First Communion. The day arrives when Elba must battle her own delusions, revive them and expel them. This may or may not help her rediscover herself, her essence, her roots.

7:30 PM: Expanded Cinema Performances - Main Theater - Michigan Theater

Microstars | Le désert mauve
Surface Connection | Senem Pirler & Monica Duncan
Night Out of Song | Scott Stark
The Sick Sense 2023: The Year We Make Kontakte (or, My Friend Flicker) | Brent Coughenour

9:00 PM: The root and the harvest/La raiz y la cosecha - The State Theatre

La mano tendida
The Reversal
Mexotico
Inventario Churubusco
Boundarymind
My cell phone
BLOKD
Ñores (sin señalar)
Dance of the Black Racer
El árbol de la noche victoriosa
Mer Depré
Tigre del Carbón
La vida de un soldado
Press Pound to Connect
How to Stage a Fight
You Are Here

9:30 PM: Films in Competition 3 - Main Theater - Michigan Theater

Memento Mori as 3,684 Cyanotype Sunprints
Parasite Family
Handbook
NIOBE
A Perfect Storm
A Comb Without Its Teeth
I'll Be Back!

Thursday, March 23, 2023

1:00 PM: Christine Panushka, Blood of the Family Tree - The State Theatre

The film portrays a struggle to understand the past and its effect on the present. Recent research suggests that trauma is genetically passed down through generations. Issues of inheritance, physical and cultural mores, and traumas situated within the body are represented by images of grandmothers, keepers, ancestors, watchers, blood cells, bones, knots, lace, trees, and roots. Can we escape our history? Probably not, but we can recognize it and make peace with it.

5:00 PM: Berbu - The Wedding Parade - The State Theatre

In Serekaniye, a city threatened by war, three young Kurdish women, Gule, Barin, and Naze, are planning the weddings of their dreams. When the first bombs hit the city, they flee Serekaniye while their destiny changes and so do their dreams.
5:30 PM: Penny Stamps Speaker Series Presents Sam Green: 32 Sounds - Main Theater - Michigan Theater
Sam Green
JD Samson
Michael O’Neill

7:00 PM: Remembrance/Vacancy: The Films of Edward Owens - The State Theatre

Remembrance: A Portrait Study
Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts
Tomorrow’s Promise

7:30 PM: Films in Competition 4 - Main Theater - Michigan Theater

Assemblage No. 2
forms with space and distance and hills  
giroscopio
Beautiful Figures
Fleshwork  
The Sea Is Also Yours
The One Who Went South
Laika

9:00 PM: Radical Curiosity: Short Films by Sam Green (2000-2021) - The State Theatre

Known for his feature films including The Weather Underground (2003) and 32 Sounds (2022), Sam Green is also a prolific storyteller in short-form documentary. This program highlights a selection of Green’s shorts from 2000 to 2021. Visit the unmarked grave of an 18-year-old Hells Angels victim, explore the greatest pet cemetery in the world, watch fog envelop iconic San Francisco streets, and listen to the world around you with pioneering experimental composer Annea Lockwood. Green’s playful curiosity and eclectic approach guarantees something for everyone in this wide-ranging ode to grief, ephemera, history, and life itself.   
Julius Caesar Was Buried in a Pet Cemetery
Pie Fight ’69
lot 63, grave c
N-Judah
A Cinematic Study of Fog in San Francisco
Clear Glasses
Annea Lockwood / A Film About Listening

9:30 PM: Films in Competition 5: Out Night - Main Theater - Michigan Theater

Bigger on the Inside
Spirits (Ysbrydion)
The Garden of Fauns   
Gold and Mud
a story that doesn't have to do with me
BLUSH – An Extraordinary Voyage

Friday, March 24, 2023

1:00 PM: Amir George, The Romare Marquee - The State Theatre

Shades of Shadows
Moments of Intention
Optimum Continuum 3.1
Impepho
a strange bitter
Man of The People
Silence of Clarity

5:00 PM: Dor (Longing) - The State Theatre

Dor (Longing)
Half Wet
5:30 PM: Films in Competition 6: Celluloid - U-M School of Kinesiology Building
Jill, Uncredited
Daron, Daron Colbert
Deep 1
Looking Backward
Bambi
Light’s Return
recortes

7:00 PM: Celluloid Body - The State Theatre

Cocktail de Rayas
landing
A Small Place
Detalles de un Atardecer
Her Silent Seaming
Giverny (Négresse Impériale)
Gently Down the Stream
First Version
Golden Ghost Gone
Close the Lid Gently

7:30 PM: Films in Competition 7 - Main Theater - Michigan Theater

Somewhere Higher
Cactus Touch
rough cut botanical
In Passing
Hysteresis
Pyrotechnics
The Stream XII-II
Conversations With A Koel Bird  

9:00 PM: Huahua's Dazzling World and its Myriad Temptations - The State Theatre

Huahua, an eccentric and exuberant woman from Xiongan New Area, livestreams herself dancing, singing, and chatting with fans for a living. Cellphone screens, beauty filters, and digital soundscapes reveal a world that Huahua creates with her own image.
9:30 PM: Films in Competition 8: Animation - Main Theater - Michigan Theater
You're Not Listening (Iive cinema performance, in person only)
Der Blaue Reiter
Limits
La Passante
Of Wood
morning
All the Blue Cats Look Like the Same Color
The Moon Rises During the Day (Sound Sculpture)
Ganbatene

11:00 PM: Weekend - The State Theatre

A surreal tale of a married couple going on a road trip to visit the wife’s parents with the intention of killing them for the inheritance. This outrageous, chaotic 1967 film vividly demonstrates how French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard (1930–2022) broke so many rules and conventions to become an iconoclastic pioneer of modern cinema art.

Saturday, March 25, 2023

1:00 PM: Up The River With Acid - U-M School of Kinesiology Building

Two days in the life of Horst, an elderly man whose life has been upended by dementia. After years of wandering the globe, the filmmaker’s parents have returned to his mother’s village in France. His father, who worked as a philosophy professor for 42 years, has slowly seen his cognitive abilities decrease and his daily life increasingly difficult to negotiate. Through a series of portraits we observe a man’s attempt to hold on to a rapidly shifting and alien world.

1:30 PM: Films in Competition 9: Almost All Ages - Main Theater - Michigan Theater

System
Sit Down, Don't Touch Anything
BOOM
Red House
Salin
Back to School
Menagerie
There is exactly enough time
Women (Nico)

3:00 PM: Darkness, Darkness, Burning Bright - U-M School of Kinesiology Building

Handmade and uniquely personal, this 16mm film in two parts explores a rural landscape with mythical connotations. First part: prelude. “Darkness, darkness, burning bright In the forests of the night. Vast flowered paths, fresh branches, Groves full of perfumes, birds and whispers, Site often seen again, and always contemplated....” Second part: oraison. “Darkness, darkness, burning bright In the forests of the night And the mad impulse of this distraught soul, And that had, the forehead circled in copper, under the moon….”

3:30 PM: Films in Competition 10 - Main Theater - Michigan Theater

corps minéral
Decay
Neighbour Abdi
Bird in the Peninsula
A wind grazes your door
Syzygy

5:00 PM: Adieu Sauvage - The State Theatre

Since the 2000s, several waves of male suicide have followed one another in the Amerindian population of the Colombian Amazon. The filmmaker discovers that lovesickness is often the cause. Wives leave their husbands for “white” men who think that Indians do not feel anything because they do not express their feelings in the Cacua Language. Is it possible that members of the Cacua community have no feelings and no words to talk about love?

5:30 PM: Kapr Code - Main Theater - Michigan Theater

A “documentary opera” reconstructing the life of Jan Kapr (1914-1988), a contradictory Czech composer who was at first a prominent communist, a Stalin Award laureate who was later banned in socialist Czechoslovakia and erased from public memory. Director Lucie Králová starts a philharmonic dialogue with Kapr by mixing newly composed opera songs (written by Jirí Adámek) with Kapr’s never-before-shown private archive, revealing his humor, inner struggles, and desire to leave a mark.
7:00 PM: MFW Decades - The State Theatre
Kiri (Fog)   
Murray and Max Talk About Money
Dream City
Left-Handed Memories
Missing Green
Dimka
Cornelia/Fabian (Takes 2 & 1)
How to Make an Avatar & Render my Body

7:30 PM: Films in Competition 11 - Main Theater - Michigan Theater

Three Short Shorts
Rare: The Boy Who Cried Swag
Urban Dreamscape
Hailstone
The Truss Arch
Un-Tidal
Skyscraper Film
Pulsar

9:00 PM: Super Natural - The State Theatre

Super Natural is a film that talks and listens, that interferes and seeks out those who are beholding it. Its desire is to abandon the screen, to take a look at those who look at it, and listen to them, but also to be smelled and seen beyond what is being seen. Super Natural is a transcendent experience occurring outside of the body, of all bodies, but particularly of one’s own. It is like a superpower and, in this movement, it focuses on the image, a sensitive existence one intends to speak with. That is why this film aspires, in a speculative gesture, to activate an effect, a hypothetical relaxation, a sensory experience for those who are off the screen as if they were on it.

9:30 PM: Films in Competition 12 - Main Theater - Michigan Theater

Face Home View
ML CRSH
in the realm of a dying star
Max and the Freaks
Against Reality  
Pigment-Dispersion Syndrome
Lo-Tech Reality
In the Big Yard Inside the Teeny-Weeny Pocket
left/right/wrong (or, RGB and You and Me): The Sick Sense, Part 3

Sunday,  March 26,  2023

12:00 PM: I have not been afraid of going blind for a long time - The State Theatre

“Today, a flock of starlings swooshed past overhead. / In my mind, I repeat the sound over and over, / while I watch the footage.” Filmmaker Yannick Mosimann captures his environment with the camera, fearing he might be losing it more and more. Strict rules about using the entire clip length and its original audio track inform the editing process. The tableaus and their insistence on duration create a pull into an increasingly isolated state of perceiving the outside world in its unspectacular yet strangely unfamiliar intensity.

12:30 PM: Life, Ritual, Cinema: The Experimental Films of Donald Richie - Main Theater - Michigan Theater

Boy with Cat (Neko to shonen)
The Dead Boy (Shinda shonen)
Stillness—Suspension—Motion (Sei—chu—do)
Atami Blues
Life Life Life
Life (Jinsei)
War Games (Senso gokko)
Human Sacrifice (Gisei)
Cybele: A Pastoral Ritual in Five Scenes

2:30 PM: Answering the Sun - Main Theater - Michigan Theater

Rainer Kohlberger’s work speaks of seduction, an overstimulation and deception of the senses, monochrome-pumping color surfaces, powerful drones. A night-black sequence in front of a wall of sound is followed by a hallucinatory passage without sound, which finally turns into shimmering Op art geometry. Strong light signals create afterimages on the retina, while specific acoustic stimuli stimulate the ear to generate sounds on its own, and the entire body is affected with an implicit loss of control. And in all the dizzying flickering, throbbing, and pulsating, a sun ball appears, largely bathed in vibrant colors.

3:00 PM: Between Resilience and Resistance - The State Theatre

Make-Out (Newsreel #49)
New Left Note
Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron)
An Infinite Loop for Resistance ft. Aldo Tambellini
Singing in Oblivion
Notes for a Déjà Vu

5:00 PM: Awards Screening 1 - Main Theater - Michigan Theater

Come for the live announcement of the 61st AAFF awards and a screening of select awarded films.

7:00 PM: Awards Screening 2 - Main Theater - Michigan Theater

Stay for a second screening to see even more of the award-winning films from the 61st AAFF.

Date: March 21 - 26, 2023

Location: Various Venues, Ann Arbor, MI

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