Almost Gone: The 52nd Ann Arbor Film Festival Traveling Tour

Lagos Island, by Karimah Ashadu

Sunday May 17, 2015, 7:30 pm

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Almost Gone: The 52nd Ann Arbor Film Festival Traveling Tour, Digital Program B

At the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90028

Multiple Los Angeles premieres!

For more event information: www.lafilmforum.org, or 323-377-7238

The Ann Arbor Film Festival Traveling Tour gives Los Angeles audiences a chance to see the best new experimental films and digital works. Program B features nine films, including Karimah Ashadu’s Lagos Island, the Best of the Fest for 2014; two wonderful animated films, including Karolina Glusiec’s Velocity, which received the Best Animated Film Award; Shambhavi Kaul’s exploration of the uncanny through empty movie sets in Mount Song; and Jim Finn’s radically hilarious Encounters with Your Inner Trotsky Child.

Tickets: $10 general, $6 students/seniors; free for Filmforum members. Available by credit card in advance from Brown Paper Tickets at http://bpt.me/1565126 or at the door.

The AAFF is the longest-running film festival tour, having pioneered the concept in 1964. The 52nd AAFF Tour runs from August 2014 through February 2015, screening in galleries, art house theaters, universities, media art centers and cinematheques throughout North America.

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By Ian Cheng

New York, NY | 2013 | 3 min

Motion capture choreography simulated against motion capture choreography. —IC

Velocity

By Karolina Glusiec

London, UK | 2012 | 6 min

“I always thought I had a perfect memory. I wanted to show these drawings to you.” A collection of memories, drawings and loss. — KG

52nd AAFF Chris Frayne Award for Best Animated Film

The Blazing World

By Jessica Bardsley

Boston, MA | 2013 | 20 min.

A troubling relationship arises between the character played by Winona Ryder in the film Girl,

Interrupted, the genuine depression experienced by the actress, and the shoplifting of which she was accused. Consisting entirely of clips stolen from existing films, this video essay, which ultimately turns out to be profoundly personal, explores possible links between depression and klepto- mania. —JB

Cold Open

By Seamus Harahan

Belfast, N. Ireland | 2013 | 12 min

Six scenes recorded over one year in the vicinity of the Waterworks (Queen Mary’s Park), in north Belfast; with Harahan interested in a “making that ‘is’ about looking, recording before thought, the visual consequence of an absent minded gaze in response to the world; locating yourself, locating others – mapping emotional and intellectual spaces, being part of the moving mass; the accumulation of meanings in the dislocation of the familiar, where narratives recede in the minutiae of gesture and sound.”

52nd AAFF Jury Award

Der Spaziergang

By Margaret Rorison

Baltimore, MD | 2013 | 3 min

A document of my extensive walks taken throughout the city of Berlin, during the cold days of April 1–7, 2013. The film is edited in camera and composed of single frame snapshots along with longer moments of glance, captured on one 100’ roll of film. The soundtrack incorporates field recordings from these walks, as well as a handmade beat sequencer and electromagnetic pickups capturing the engine of a 16mm projector. The title comes from a story by Robert Walser. – MR

Lagos Island

By Karimah Ashadu

Nigeria/UK | 2012 | 4 min

52nd AAFF Ken Burns Award for Best of the Festival

Ashadu has constructed a “Camera Wheel Mechanism” from scrap materials found on the Lagos Island coast, inspired by the region’s hawkers and laborers and their ubiquitous, overburdened, handmade carts. A camera encased inside the mechanism depicts a constantly shifting perspective of the coastline, creating an atmosphere both playful and tense. Homes built by migrants on the coast will soon be destroyed by the Lagos government in a bid to clean up the city.

Mount Song

By Shambhavi Kaul

Durham, NC / Mumbai, Maharashtra | 9 min

A current runs underneath. It creeps under the door, makes its way into the cracks, revealing, obfuscating or breaking as clouds in the sky. Mountain, cave, river, forest and trap door; martial gestures, reiterated, stripped and rendered. A storm blows through. A parrot comments from a flowering branch. Here, the surfaces of set-constructions are offered for our attachments. —SK

Encounters with Your Inner Trotsky Child

By Jim Finn

Brooklyn, NY | 2013 | 21min

Another chapter in the parallel-leftist-universe of Jim Finn, this video appears to be part of a communist self-help videotape series made in the early 1990s. The series author, Lois Severin, was responding to the move from mass sociopolitical engagement of the 60s and 70s to the personal fulfillment fantasies of the 80s – the Jane Fonda-ization of the Left.

The Great Rabbit

By Atsushi Wada

Kobe, Japan | 2012 | 7.5 min

52nd AAFF Prix DeVarti for Funniest Film

Once we called the noble, profound and mysterious existence The Great. We have moved with the time, our thought and consciousness has changed. And yet what makes us still keep calling it The Great? —AW