Experimental Shorts from the 53rd Ann Arbor Film Festival

DIGITAL PROGRAM - PART A [80 minutes]

These eight works include audience favorites such as the animated films Symphony No. 42, a series of 47 surreal, absurd and poignant vignettes by Hungarian animator Réka Busci; Seven Signs that Mean Silence (awarded Prix DeVarti for Funniest Film) by Brooklyn-based artist Sara Magenheimer; and Daisy Jacobs’ innovative The Bigger Picture, which received the 53rd AAFF Award for Best Animated Film. Other works include Ephraim Asili's Many Thousands Gone (Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker), a portrait of Harlem, New York and Salvador, Brazil, with an original improvised soundtrack by legendary jazz musician Joe McPhee; Babash, Lisa Truttmann and Behrouz Rae’s beguiling observational portrait of a Farsi-speaking parrot; layover, Vanessa Renwick's exhilarating document of the Vaux's Swifts descent in Portland during their annual migration to South America; Special Features, fragmentary stories in the form of a series of interviews by Brooklyn-based artist James N. Kienitz Wilkins (53rd AAFF George Manupelli Founder’s Spirit Award); and All That is Solid, a video essay filmed in the electronic waste grounds and illegal gold mines of Ghana by Paris-based filmmaker Louis Henderson (53rd AAFF Award for Emerging Experimental Video Artist).

The Bigger Picture
Daisy Jacobs
London, UK | 2014 | 8 min | Digital
Chris Frayne Award for Best Animated Film
‘You want to put her in a home; you tell her; tell her now!’ hisses one brother to the other. But Mother won’t go, and their own lives unravel as she clings on. Innovative life-size animated characters tell the stark and darkly humorous tale of caring for an elderly parent. -DJ

Seven Signs that Mean Silence
Sara Magenheimer
Brooklyn, NY | 2014 | 11 min | Digital
Prix DeVarti for Funniest Film
Two disembodied voices, Paul and Veena, wonder what things mean and what means things. Seven Signs that Mean Silence is a story about the human search for meaning in a dark void, and a story of love and friendship; between symbols and letters, words and voices, sound and image, objects and their names, poetry and speech. – SM

Babash
Lisa Truttmann & Behrouz Rae
USA / Austria / Iran | 2014 | 9 min | Digital
The No Violence Award
Babash is a parrot. He lives in Los Angeles. Kept by an Iranian family, he speaks mostly Farsi. Sometimes Babash mixes English and Azeri into his conversations. Behrouz Rae has made friends with Babash over the years. Babash is an associative portrait about a special relationship and the domestic surroundings in which it grew. Observing Babash and Behrouz, intervening upon them with color panels, inventing a common language, a focus emerges of a shared misplacement within this genuine friendship. – LT

Many Thousands Gone
Ephraim Asili
Hudson, NY | 2015 | 8 min | 16mm on digital
Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker
Filmed on location in Salvador, Brazil (the last city in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw slavery) and Harlem, New York (an international stronghold of the African Diaspora), Many Thousands Gone draws parallels between a summer afternoon on the streets of the two cities. A silent version of the film was given to jazz multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee to use as an interpretive score. The final film is the combination of the images and a modified version of McPhee’s real time “sight reading” of the score. – EA

layover
Vanessa Renwick
Portland, OR | 2014 | 7 min | Digital
Swirling in enchanting flight, the Vaux’s Swifts layover for three weeks in Portland, Oregon each fall on their migration to South America.

All That Is Solid
Louis Henderson
Paris, France | 2014 | 15 min | Digital
The Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award for Emerging Experimental Video Artist
“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848
A technographic study of e-recycling and neo-colonial mining filmed in the Agbogbloshie electronic waste ground in Accra and illegal gold mines of Ghana. The video constructs
a mise-en-abyme as critique in order to dispel the capitalist myth of the immateriality of new technology—thus revealing the mineral weight with which the Cloud is grounded to its earthly origins. – LH

Special Features
James N. Kienitz Wilkins
Brooklyn, NY | 2014 | 12 min | Digital
George Manupelli Founder’s Spirit Award
Special Features is an apparent interview with three highlights. Presented as if a fragment from an unnamed video production, an interviewee interacts with an interviewer, recounting a special experience at once unique and shared.

Symphony No. 42
Réka Bucsi
Budapest, Hungary | 2014 | 10 min | Digital
A subjective world through 47 scenes. Small events, interlaced by associations, express the irrational coherence of our surroundings. The surreal situations are based on the interactions of humans and nature. – RB

Cost: Free and open to the public

Sponsors: The Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI)