Mills Folly Microcinema will present a program from the 61st Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour on Wednesday, September 27 at 7:00pm. Admission $5.00, free for ALL members. Seating is limited, and doors open at 6:30 p.m. A $1 fee will be added for single admission credit card charges, but no fee for multiple admissions ($10 or more).
Established in 1963, the Ann Arbor Film Festival (AAFF) is the oldest avant garde and experimental film festival in North America. In 2023, the festival featured 46 programs with over 170 films from nearly 40 countries of all lengths and genres, including experimental, animation, documentary, narrative, hybrid, and performance based works. The 61st Festival took place in person March 21-26, 2023 and online March 21-29.
AAFF, a pioneer of the film festival touring concept, has been presenting an annual tour of selected works from the festival since 1964 to galleries, art house theaters, museums, universities, libraries, microcinemas, and media arts centers throughout the world. All filmmakers participating on the tour are paid to screen their work, providing direct support to these independent artists.
Parasite Family | Prapat Jiwarangsan | Bangkok, Thailand | 2022 | 5 minutes
Peter Wilde Award for Most Technically Innovative Film
Parasite Family is constructed from old film negatives discovered in an out-of-business film lab. Using analog and digital editing techniques, Prapat Jiwarangsan breathes new energy into these old films. He accompanies them on their journey from the world of analog to the world of digital, and finally to the world of AI-generated images and NFT artworks. Suggesting that these faces represent a certain kind of family that is parasitic on Thai society—the kind of families and institutions that absorb wealth and power—they gradually evolve into a new species of monster.
Daron, Daron Colbert | Kevin Edward Steen | Detroit, MI | 2022 | 14 minutes
University of Michigan Credit Union (UMCU) Audience Award
Living on the edge of one the most polluted zip codes in the US, an actor prepares for a role.
2cent / 10coil | Monteith McCollum | Binghamton, NY | 2022 | 10 minutes
Gil Omenn Art & Science Award
Part science, part history, 2cent / 10coil is an exploration into the physical properties of a U.S. postage stamp and the anomalies it presents when subjected to the beam of an electron microscope. Integrated within are the philosophical musings and speeches of a man in his last weeks of life on a quest entitled “The Voyage of Understanding.”
Language Unknown | Janelle VanderKelen | Milwaukee, WI / Barcelona, Spain | 2022 | 7 minutes
Lawther/Graff No Violence Award
This film embraces plant sentience as fact and speculates how beings of the vegetal variety might approach interspecies communication with humans who are far more sensorially limited. Leaves, mycelium, and roots playfully examine how humans experience the world. These supposedly silent watchers consider what language these swift human blurs might possibly understand.
Eclipsis | Tania Hernández Velasco | Mexico City, Mexico | 2022 | 16 minutes
Susan Dise Best Experimental Film
A recently discovered monarch butterfly subspecies (Danaus plexippus eclipsis) possesses strange toxins in its scales that cause powerful sensorial alterations in its predators. Intertwining vivid colors and textures of microscopic footage with the sway of the human body, Eclipsis is a sci-fi speculation of what would happen to human beings if they came across the Eclipsis butterfly in the midst of our painful world.
Arrest in Flight | Adrian Flury | Zug, Switzerland | 2021 | 8 minutes
Chris Frayne Award for Best Animated Film
This experiment in film sets the stage for a hitherto unseen magical life form. The film focuses on the non-obvious character of movement when transferred to an alien object thus endowed with the life derived from the movement’s true to life source.
Diomysus | Emily Elizabeth Morus-Jones | Bangor, UK | 2022 | 5 minutes
Prix DeVarti for Funniest Film
An experimental film where a group of mice (voiced by members of the UK polyamorous community whose identities are masked using puppetry) discuss their experiences of polyamory. Diomysus asks the question, “Are we (the audience) more open to taboo ideas if unconscious bias is eliminated?”
rough cut botanical | Wendy Kirkup Glasgow, UK | 2022 | 8 minutes
rough cut botanical interweaves multiple images of plant and animal life while a voice speaks to the materiality of its subject matter and to film itself. Inspired by audio description, it playfully explores how two people may speak their space together. Shot on 16mm, the film uses a matte box, an old cinematic technique to create multiple exposures.
ABOUT MILLS FOLLY MICROCINEMA
Mills Folly Microcinema showcases nationally recognized experimental film and video art work from the festival and microcinema circuit. We network with regional filmmakers and organizations to bring filmmakers and guest programmers to Madison for screenings. And we incubate local experimental filmmaking by providing screen time at Project Projection events.
