64th Ann Arbor Film Festival: Traveling Tour

The world’s oldest experimental and avant-garde film festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival (AAFF), showed 19 short films at the Wealthy Theatre on Sunday, Nov. 8, free of charge to theatergoers, as part of its annual traveling tour. The 64th AAFF is one of the state’s premier film events, and its annual pitstop in Grand Rapids should be considered must-watch viewing for film lovers. 

The AAFF tour compiles a selection of its award-winning short films from the previous festival into two programs. The films varied from three to 12 minutes. Both programs screened at Wealthy Theatre and represented 10 countries: Germany, Canada, United States, Israel, France, Iran, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and Ukraine. 

As nationally and linguistically diverse as they are, the films represented an equivalent range of approaches to experimental filmmaking, from tripartite split-screen screeds against toxic masculinity and collage films to experimental essays that use colored glasses to filter overlapping red and blue streams and feed different viewers different images. It wouldn’t be an AAFF without such diversity.

The German-French vegan female art collective NEOZOON opened the program with “JUGGERNAUT,” the winner of the Terri Schwartz Film Award for Parody and Satire. White men speaking English preach in dull platitudes, “manifesting” their own shallow definitions of success by repeating machismo self-help talking points. The entire short is shown in split-screen triptychs that combine contemporary YouTube footage with 1950s advertisements to comically draw attention to the universality (and omnipresence) of this masculine stereotype. 

Continue reading at The Rapidian for reviews of JUGGERNAUT, Au Hasard, Tooborac, Faceless Hairy Cry, So Many Different Things, Tales of Lake Dian, The Sky Was Candy, and A Kite Killed A Plane.