The 51st Ann Arbor Film Festival Traveling Tour, Digital Program

Handful of Dust

Los Angeles Filmforum concludes its 2013 programming with what is now an annual tradition – the Ann Arbor Film Festival Traveling Tour, giving Los Angeles audiences a chance to see the best new experimental works from around the world! Los Angeles Filmforum is pleased to present the 51st AAFF Traveling Tour. This program of short films includes recent experimental, narrative, documentary and animated films from England, Canada, India and the US; all selected from the most recent Ann Arbor Film Festival. We’ll be presenting a program of 16mm films from the festival in January!

Tickets: $10 general, $6 students/seniors; free for Filmforum members. Available by credit card in advance from Brown Paper Tickets at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/523109 or at the door.

The AAFF is the longest-running film festival tour, having pioneered the concept in 1964. The 51st AAFF Tour runs from August 2013 through February 2014, screening in galleries, art house theaters, universities, media art centers and cinematheques throughout North America.

Marcel, King of Tervuren

by Tom Schroeder
St. Paul, MN | 2012 | 6 min
Marcel survives the bird flu, alcohol, sleeping pills and his son Max. Though blinded in one eye, he remains the King of Tervuren. A Greek tragedy as acted out by Belgian roosters. – TS

Pittsburgh 8/5/68

by Ted Kennedy
Brooklyn, NY | 2013 | 2.5 min
IMAGE: Raid at Erectors Club (Pittsburgh 8/5/68).
SOUND: “Turn Around, Look At Me” by The Vogues (Pittsburgh 6/15/1968).
Pittsburgh 8/5/68 is part of a series of films based on the original 16mm camera rolls from a Pittsburgh TV news station during 1968/69.

I Am Micro

by Shumona Goel, Shai Heredia
Bombay, India | 2012 | 15 min
Shot in an abandoned optics factory and centered on the activities of a low budget film crew, I Am Micro is an experimental essay about filmmaking, the medium of film, and the spirit of making independent cinema. – SG, SH

Handful of Dust

by Hope Tucker
Boston, MA | 2013 | 9 min
Prussian blue can be used to render images and counteract radiation poisoning. This obituary is composed of sequences of hundreds of cyanotypes, exposed in the sand using paper sensitized with handmade emulsion and negatives from a 1954 American film shot in Cinemascope. Rates of cancer in the film’s cast and crew reflect that it was shot downwind during the period of above ground nuclear testing. Handful of Dust, produced in the Utah canyon where the 1954 film was shot, is designed as an antidote to recover the memory of the downwinders.

Buffalo Death Mask

by Mike Hoolboom
Toronto, ON, Canada | 2013 | 23 min
A conversation with Canadian painter Stephen Andrews returns us to a precocktail moment, when being HIV+ afforded us the consolation of certainty.

Wrest

by Kent Lambert
Chicago, IL | 2012 | 5 min
Kent Lambert reinvents footage deposited in the Chicago Film Archives into a psychedelic dream narrative of collapsed ambitions and subliminal desire. Home movies, stag films and wrestling newsreels combine with the motirik rhythms of Chicago’s CAVE to produce a stuttering, shivering mid-western dream beast. Dancers, puppets, headlocks and Disneyland share split seconds in this dense and driven collage.

Someone behind the door knocks at irregular intevals by James Lowne smaller

Someone behind the door knocks at irregular intervals

by James Lowne
London, England | 2010 | 5 min
Julia spends the day at the leisure center where she slips into a somber reverie. As her thoughts continue she becomes aware of the possibility that perhaps she never came here at all. Outside in the sun, the stillness changes the road, it’s inherent notion of speed has dissipated, allowing the surface to be felt. – JL

Here is Everything

by Duke and Battersby
Lafayette, NY | 2013 | 15 min
Here Is Everything presents itself as a message from The Future, as narrated by a cat and a rabbit, spirit guides who explain that they’ve decided to speak to us via a contemporary art video because they understand this to be our highest form of communication. Their cheeky introduction, however, belies the complex set of ideas that fill the remainder of the film. Death, God, and attaining and maintaining a state of Grace are among the thematic strokes winding their way through the piece, rapturously illustrated with animation, still and video imagery. It is a work that contains specific details about its themes, but sufficiently ambiguous and free of dogma, including religious dogma that, our futuristic visitors explain, is a vestigial leftover from an earlier phase of revolution. And while Death is an ever-present rumination, so are Redemption, Affirmation, and Possibility. – D&B