Best of Ann Arbor Film Festival Part 1
Your Truly (Parker, 2007)
The AAFF Tour is a program of many of the finest cutting-edge, creative and artfully crafted independent films from the most recent festival. Many of the films included on the tour won awards at the 46th AAFF, as well as at other notable festivals such as Rotterdam, Sundance, Slamdance, and Black Maria. The program serves as an inspired alternative to the Oscar®-nominated shorts program, which also travels across the U.S. each year.
Animated masterpiece Yours Truly, by British filmmaker Osbert Parker, uses innovative techniques to create a funny and shocking film noir mash-up. Catherine Chalmers’s Safari (lower right) vividly brings us into the world of insects and reptiles in a way that is creepy, artfully gorgeous and beyond anything shown on National Geographic. Opening the program is Doxology (lower left), by Michael Langan, which explores reverential inspiration through cutting-edge and humorous animation techniques.
Since its inception in 1964, the AAFF tour has showcased hundreds of influential works by filmmakers such as Barbara Hammer, Gus Van Sant, Sally Cruikshank, Don Hertzfeldt, Bill Brown, Ross McLaren, Paul Winkler, James Duesing, and Jay Rosenblatt.