Tour Program
The 48th AAFF Tour offers 28 short films across three different programs, each featuring award-winning and favorite new selected works.
Program One Program Two 16mm Program
Program One
[91 min - preview clips available on Vimeo here]
Wednesday Morning Two A.M.
Lewis Klahr | Los Angeles, CA | 6 minutes [Tiger Award at Int'l Film Festival Rotterdam 2010]
This is the first completed film of a new series entitled “Couplets”. These will generally, but not exclusively, organize themselves around the pairing of various pop songs and just as in these songs lyrics, the theme of love. —L.K.
Attack of the Robots from Nebula-5
Chema García Ibarra | Elche, SPAIN | 7 minutes [Funniest Film Award 48th AAFF]
Almost everybody is going to die very soon.
Missed Aches
Joanna Priestley | Portland, OR | 4 minutes [Jury Award at Black Maria Festival 2010]
Have you ever worked very horde on a paper for English clash, just to get a very glow raid? Proofreading your peppers is a matter of the the utmost impotence! Missed Aches demonstrates how the shortcomings of spellcheck can result in unexpected double entendres.
From the Archives of an Inventor
Stephen Wetzel | Milwaukee, WI | 20 minutes [Jury Award 48th AAFF]
Invention and America seem inseparable. The country has a restless image of itself as a work in progress; and the character at its core is the inventor — equal parts entrepreneur and crackpot, path-setter and outsider. Wetzel's piece is a found-footage exploration of one such character, a Midwestern inventor whose house has been transformed into a playful model of the future with mechanized armchairs and a domestic robot.
Please Say Something
David O'Reilly | Berlin, Germany | 10 minutes [Best Animated Film Award 48th AAFF]
A troubled relationship between a Cat and Mouse set in the distant Future. 23 episodes of exactly 25 seconds each.
Black Rain
Semiconductor | Brighton, England | 3 minutes
Working with STEREO satellite scientists, Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) collected all the HI (Heliospheric Imager) image data to date, revealing the journey of the satellites from their initial orientation, to their current tracing of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. Solar wind, CME's, passing planets and comets orbiting the sun can be seen as background stars and the milky way pass by.
Travelling Fields
Inger Lise Hansen | Oslo, Norway | 9 min. [Most Technically Innovative Film 48th AAFF
N. American premiere at 48th AAFF]
Moving between different topographies and locations in the Kola Peninsula, Northern Russia, this film explores sections of the landscape by moving the camera upside/down, one frame at the time, along a track. The work focuses on a particular phenomenon occurring through a change of perspective and animated camera movements, as a way of redefining a place and its geography.
Portrait #3: House of Sound
Vanessa Renwick | Portland, OR | 11 minutes [Feeding the Soul Award 48th AAFF]
Through radio interviews and a photography-driven visit to the neighborhood of record store "House of Sound" long after the wrecking ball, this film reflects the soul of a mix-tape era of music and the heart of a community-based business. Renwick's latest in her ongoing "Portrait" series of stories in Portland, Oregon.
Fantasy Suite
Kent Lambert | Chicago, IL | 7 minutes
A meditation on mainstream American heterosexual romance. - K.L.
Beauty Plus Pity
Duke & Battersby | Syracuse, NY | 14 minutes [Best of Festival Award 48th AAFF]
Presented in seven parts, "Beauty Plus Pity" contemplates the shame and beauty of existence; it is part apologia, part call to arms. -D&B
Program Two
[92 min - preview clips available on Vimeo here]
Mecanismo Olvidador (Forgetter Mechanism)
Juan Gonzalez | Los Angeles, CA | 3 minutes [N. American premiere at 48th AAFF]
A view of life as a pendulum. For Schopenhauer, “Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom” and the metaphor is intriguing. This hand drawn animation is a personal representation of life as a vertiginous journey. -J.C.G.
Scene 32
Shambhavi Kaul | Durham, NC | 6 minutes
The salt fields of Central Kutch are examined through High Definition video and hand processed Hi contrast 16mm film to become another thing altogether: neither a specific location in India nor its representation, but a rebuilt world of precipices and gullies, untouchable textures and unfathomable scale.
Triumph of the Wild
Martha Colburn | New York, NY | 5 minutes
This is a chronological film of America beginning with the American Revolution, and WW1 & 2. "The hunting impulse as a primary force, the impotence of man in the face of nature, the senseless dominance of weapons, and destructive violence – all with an imagined ideal state of affairs in mind – represent major motifs." - Birgid Uccia
Songs from the Shed
Melika Bass | Chicago, IL | 23 minutes [Best Cinematography Award 48th AAFF]
A decayed slice of Midwestern Gothic. Part musical, part melodrama. A fractured, makeshift family ekes out a meditative existence, their
lives mysteriously intertwined through ritual and habit.
Sleeping Bear
Jack Cronin | Ann Arbor, MI | 11 minutes [Best Michigan Filmmaker Award 48th AAFF]
Filmed at the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northern Michigan over the course of three years, this work, which loosely follows the cycle of seasons, is a study of the landscape and an attempt to represent the unique character of this region.
Twist of Fate
Karen Aqua | Cambridge, MA | 9 minutes [Eileen Maitland Award 48th AAFF]
This 35mm experimental animated film explores the transformative
experience of being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. This expressionistic piece captures impressions of such an experience: upheaval, uncertainty, a sense of physical intrusion, and loss of control. Exploring this emotional and physical landscape, the film
visualizes an internal world inside the body, imagined on a cellular level.
Vineland
Laura Kraning | Altadena, CA | 10 minutes [Jury Award 48th AAFF]
At the last drive-in movie theater in Los Angeles, dislocated Hollywood images filled with apocalyptic angst float within the desolate nocturnal landscape of the City of Industry. In this border zone, re-framed and mirrored projections collide with the displaced radio broadcast soundtrack, revealing overlapping realities at the intersection of nostalgia and alienation.
Still Raining, Still Dreaming
Phil Solomon | Broomfield, Colorado | 15 minutes
Phil Solomon uses the animated world of the Grand Theft Auto videogame as source material to create a powerful, elegiac work. The last installment of Solomon's three-part series In Memoriam (for Mark LaPore).
Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis
Daichi Saito | Montreal, Canada | 10 minutes [Best of Festival 48th AAFF]
The second collaboration, between Saïto and composer/violinist Malcolm Goldstein, who composed and performed for the film the original structured improvisation score, “Hues of the Spectrum.” The film explores familiar landscape imagery Saïto and Goldstein share in their neighbourhood at the foot of Mount-Royal Park in Montréal, Canada. Using the images of maple trees in the park as main visual motif, Saïto creates a film in which the formations of the trees and their subtle interrelation with the space around them act as an agent to transform viewer’s sensorial perception of the space portrayed. Entirely hand-processed by the filmmaker, Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis, with the contrapuntal violin by Goldstein, is a poem of vision and sounding that seeks certain perceptual insight and revelation through a syntactical structure based on patterns, variations and repetition.
16mm Program
[80 min - preview clips available on Vimeo here]
Role
Denise Oleksijczuk | Vancouver, Canada | 9 minutes [U.S. premiere at 48th AAFF]
Based on a reconsideration of Robert Bresson’s 1967 film Mouchette (after Georges Bernanos’ 1937 novella of the same name), this film presents a new end to the story. Casting herself as a grown-up Mouchette, the director reinterpret’s Bresson’s depiction of a child’s impoverished solitude, her Christ-like suffering, and the ultimate control she assumes in her own drowning. In Role, Oleksijczuk reframes Bresson’s infamous suicide scene as a clumsy experiment rather than a transcendent release.
TUSSLEMUSCLE
Steve Cossman | Brooklyn, NY | 5 minutes [World premiere at 48th AAFF]
The work presented explores humanity’s ecological relationship and the ritual of restoration. The violent pulse speaks with a sense of urgency and chaotic struggle, while the hypnotic arrangement keeps us in blinding awe to its condition. This dynamically animated piece is composed of 7,000 single frames which were appropriated/‘recycled’ from view-master reel cells and hand-spliced to create a linear filmstrip. Original score by Jacob Long. – S.C.
Piensa en Mi
Alexandra Cuesta | USA/Ecuador | 15 minutes [Jury Award 48th AAFF]
Moving from east to west and back, the windows of a bus frame fleeting sections of urban landscape. Throughout the day, images of riders, textures of light and fragments of bodies in space come together to weave a portrait in motion; a contemplative meditation on public transport in the city of Los Angeles. Isolation, routine and everyday splendor, create the backdrop of this journey, while the intermittent sounds of cars construct the soundscape.
Zephyr
Naoyuki Tsuj | Yokohama, Japan | 6 minutes
Continuing from where Tsuji’s charcoal animation The Place Where We Were leaves off, “Zephyr refers to the Greek god of the west wind. Zephyr in Tsuji’s work comes to a baby and takes the baby into the inside of the sun. What kind of experience is waiting for the baby?”—Tomio Koyama Gallery, Kyoto
Gesturings
Peter Herwitz | Ann Arbor, MI | 7 minutes [World premiere at 48th AAFF]
This film represents the apotheosis of my handpainted film style and the belief that in the materiality of film everything is a kind of gesture: color, rhythm, texture, splice marks, funky tape splices, fingerprints, and dirt. I worked on and off on the film for seven years. Reprinting each frame twice, my hope was the slowing down would echo Baudelaire's 'Lux, Calme, et Volupte' (luxury, calm and pleasure). The film is dedicated to Bill Brand. -P.H.
The Presentation Theme
Jim Trainor | Chicago, IL | 14 minutes [The Stan Brakhage Film at Wit's End Award]
A Peruvian prisoner of war finds himself outmaneuvered by a hematophagous priestess. Based on a true story. - J.T.
Collide-a-Scope
Gregory Godhard | Sydney, Australia | 3 minutes
On the 10th September 2008, in the city of Cern,Switzerland, physicists began experiments using the most powerful ‘atom-smasher’ ever built, the Large Hadron Collider. In these experiments, scientists hoped to find the theoretical Higgs-Boson Particle, the so called ‘God Particle’. This film contains secret footage of those results. -G.G.
Golden Hour
Robert Todd | Boston, MA | 17 min [No Violence Award 48th AAFF | World premiere 48th AAFF]
What if the Looking Glass were, at the same time, a window and a mirror, if the window was the mirror, the mirror the window? And your projection through this transparent/reflective plane brings you to a world that is as externally rich as the self, with its internal churnings shifting through dark and light, directs it to be – the self and the world open to each other, if but for a moment? And that window offers itself to you as a space in your life, held shimmering in your being and your vision throughout that sustaining moment, that golden hour. - R.T.
My Tears Are Dry
Laida Lertxundi | SPAIN/USA | 4 minutes [Most Promising Filmmaker Award 48th AAFF]
A film in the three parts of a dialectic. Hoagy Land’s song is played and interrupted as guitar makes sound, two women, a bed, an armchair, and the beautiful outside. The lyrics of the song reference the eternal sunshine of California and its promises.—L.L.
Touring programs curated by AAFF Program Director, David Dinnell, and AAFF Executive Director, Donald Harrison
