Free Events

With numerous opportunities to attend AAFF events over the six-day festival, juror programs and Off The Screen programming are free and open to the public, ensuring there is something for everyone to experience and enjoy.

Juror Programs

Every year the AAFF invites three distinguished artists to jury and confer awards to deserving films and filmmakers. This year, the jury consists of accomplished filmmakers, educators, and arts leaders Kristin Reeves, Christopher Harris, and David Lebrun. Each of the three jurors will also present a specially curated program of their own work during the festival.

Wednesday 3/26 | 1pm | Michigan Theatre Screening Room

David Lebrun: Ritual and Symbol

David Lebrun’s films blend anthropology, historical documentary, animation, and experimental techniques. With over 50 years of filmmaking, he has a long history with the Ann Arbor Film Festival. This program features Sanctus (1968), an experimental ethnographic film; Tanka (1977), a psychedelic animation; and four shorts from Transfigurations: Reanimating the Past, his ongoing cycle of animations exploring artistic forms and symbols from the Paleolithic era to the Middle Ages and beyond.

Thursday 3/27 | 1pm | Michigan Theatre Screening Room

Christopher Harris: Inventory of Black Roses

Each of Christopher Harris’s projects rethinks cinematic aesthetics and explores new techniques to examine complex social and political issues. Working primarily in 16mm, his films manipulate celluloid, employ optical printing, and alter film stock to disrupt representations of Black people. Whether revisiting found footage or challenging the racial narratives of films like Birth of a Nation, Harris’s work critiques anti-Blackness, neglected histories, and misrepresented landscapes. Through radical visual forms, his films forge a space for an alternate vision of the past, present, and future.

Friday 3/28 | 1pm | Michigan Theatre Screening Room

Kristin Reeves: Bodies for Strength and Power: 9X16mm grid-films and experimental shorts

This program is a single-channel theatrical adaptation of a feature-length event, featuring two nine-projector 16mm grid-films alongside experimental short films, video, and interstitial loops, with live narration. Exploring media as body/material, this work, developed over twelve years, exhumes found footage and reanimates it through lasers and bleach to emphasize loss. Film processed via video synthesizers mimics brain signal overload. This project seeks material processes to reflect contemporary trauma, blending medical and artistic uses of media across history.

Off The Screen

New media, video, live performance, and art installations that are either ongoing during festival week or happen at a specific time. Off The Screen also includes panel discussions, workshops, and presentations by friends and artists of the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

TUESDAY 3/25

Reception

4–6pm | North Quad Space 2435

Celebrate the launch of the 63rd AAFF with this reception for expanded cinema installations, the New Voices student screening room, and Joo Won Park’s cinema performance Attack from Space! with Live Score.

Attack from Space! with Live Score

4:30pm | North Quad Space 2435

Performance by Joo Won Park

Electronic‬‭ musician‬‭ Joo‬‭ Won‬‭ Park‬‭ provides‬‭ a‬‭ live‬‭ score‬‭ to‬‭ a wildly choreographed fight sequence excerpted from the‬‭ Japanese sci-fi film Attack‬‭ from‬‭ Space!‬‭ (Koreyoshi Akasaka & Teruo Ishii, 1965).‬‭ Joo Won Park creates music with electronics, toys, and other sources that he records and synthesizes. He is the recipient of the Knight Arts Challenge Detroit (2019) and the Kresge Arts Fellowship (2020).

WEDNESDAY 3/26

Programmers Roundtable

11am–12pm | North Quad Space 2435

Roundtable moderated by Bree Andruzzi

Participants: Rose Albayat, Sean Donovan, Abigail Knox, Leslie Raymond, Brandon Walley

The 63rd AAFF received 2,621 submissions and completed 6,300 reviews to land the festival at 112 films for this year’s in-competition lineup. Besides those films, this year’s festival includes three juror programs, six special programs, three special feature films, four performances, nine salons and panels (including this one), and six after-parties. Join contributing programmers over coffee and bagels for an insightful conversation about sorting through thousands of films to construct a full festival program.

Film Art Forum

3–5pm | North Quad Space 2435

Moderated by Amanda Krugliak

Ten AAFF film artists will each present 20 slides for 20 seconds each for this pecha kucha-style event. This series of six-minute talks will cover a variety of subjects that aim to provide deeper insights into cinema as an art form, along with any other ideas the artists wish to share. The aim is to promote in-depth explorations and encourage discussion that nurtures the AAFF community.

THURSDAY 3/27

Exhibition Viewing

3–5pm | Ann Arbor Art Center

Off the Screen Artist Panel

3:00-4:30pm | Ann Arbor Art Center

Panel discussion moderated by Scott Northrup

Join this year’s Off The Screen artists for a discussion about their expanded cinema installations. Participating artists: Yazmin Dababneh, Paul Echeverria, JB Ghuman JR., Kym McDaniel, and Maddie Shubeck. Their work can be viewed at the Ann Arbor Art Center and U-M North Quad Space 2435.

FRIDAY 3/28

New Voices Film Jam

10:30am | North Quad Space 2435

Salon moderated by Chris McNamara

Students from the New Voices exhibition share and talk about their work

Student Lunch Mixer

12pm | North Quad Space 2435

Students only, RSVP in advance at aafilmfest.org/students

Students from any school may RSVP for this social hour provided by the University of Michigan Department of Film, Television, and Media. Enjoy some lunch and chat with other students from different college and university campuses.

Reanimating the Past: From Analog to Digital

3pm | North Quad Space 2435

Presentation by David Lebrun

For over 50 years, David Lebrun has been obsessed with using moving image techniques to bring ancient forms to life: scientific illustrations, signs and symbols, paintings, sculptures, and more. For the first 30 years, he used very analog tools: contact and optical printers, copy cameras, animation stands, masking tape, and retouching fluid. Then digital imaging tools arrived, and everything changed. In this workshop, David explores how his evolving toolkit has shaped the resulting films.

Neurogenesis

7:30pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium | ticket required

Live cinema performance by Allison Leigh Holt & Kit Young

Neurogenesis explores bodily trauma, at the human scale, as a site for thinking through settler colonial violence—at the familial, national, and international scales. For this performance, Allison Leigh Holt and Kit Young use AI-animated X-rays, video synthesis, spoken word, and sound created by electroacoustic composer and sound artist Amma Ateria, whose work focuses on psychoacoustics in binaural beats, equal-loudness contour, and brainwave entrainment.

SATURDAY 3/29

The Joy of LOOPing

9am–12pm | North Quad Space 2435

All ages workshop by Pickle Fort Film Collective

This interactive, Montessori-style workshop (all materials provided) will teach participants how to create their own hand-painted and hand-inked 16mm film loops on clear film leader. Upon completion, loops will be projected so that creators can enjoy their finished pieces.

Scattered Light

3pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room | ticket required

Live cinema performance by Joshua Mastel & Nicolas Cadena

Silver nitrate adheres to sensitized glass to produce a mirror in ways similar to the photochemical emulsion in film. Both are technologies of light which act as atomizers to refract and reflect the latent past and the present image. Over a coursing river of sound, Scattered Light traces a process of image generation by showing the stages of mirror gilding, from transparent glass to reflective light. Through this transformation, light becomes elemental, swirling in space and adhering in time.

To the Stars (Parable of the Now)

7:30pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium | ticket required

Performance by Quinn Hunter

To the Stars is a performance related to the ongoing project Parable of the Now, a series of gatherings in correlation with Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler’s astoundingly prescient 1993 science fiction novel. Accompanied by U-M Interarts students, Quinn Hunter activates the text of Butler’s work through a series of short monologues and a performative reading of the novel’s March 29, 2025, journal entry as it comes to pass in our own world—as Afrofuture becomes Afropresent becomes Afropast.

SUNDAY 3/30

AAFF Screener Social

10am | North Quad Space 2435

Salon hosted by Angela Lenhardt

This is an opportunity for the Ann Arbor Film Festival screening cadre to meet and socialize. All AAFF attendees are invited to come by and learn more about AAFF’s unique film screening process.

What the Hell Was That?

10:30–11:30am | North Quad Space 2435

Panel moderated by Daniel Herbert

This panel discussion has been an Ann Arbor Film Festival favorite for more than a decade. It began when a filmmaker overheard an audience member declare, “What the hell was that?” after viewing his film. An enlightening discussion ensued, and the idea for the panel was born. Join visiting filmmakers and other special guests for an opportunity to watch and discuss three short experimental films selected from this year’s festival lineup.

Off The Screen Installations

Free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.

OFF THE SCREEN INSTALLATIONS (ONGOING)

Ann Arbor Art Center | Yazmin Dababneh, Paul Echeverria, Maddie Shubeck

Escape and Puddle Portal I by Yazmin Dababneh – Mixed-media sculptures challenge perceptions of reality and create hypnotic experiences.
HOW’S IT HANGING: 100 Hours with LP by Paul Echeverria – A poignant recounting of intimate moments shared with experimental filmmaker Luther Price.
Holding and I’m Hungry by Maddie Shubeck – Video installations that comment on analog sentiment and media consumption.

North Quad 2435 | JB Ghuman, Jr.; Kym McDaniel; Rory Scott; plus New Voices

paSSive poWer 4D 360 VR by JB Ghuman, Jr. – A sonic visual VR experience exploring human existence.
If I Could Take Me from That Room, I Would Never Give Me Back by Kym McDaniel – Mixed media installation with 3-channel video and salvaged extension cords symbolizing a body in constant transformation.
Impermanence | 13 by Rory Scott – Augmented reality compilation of works from 2010-2023, reflecting both personal and technological growth.
New Voices screening room with student work from AAFF partnering colleges and universities

Michigan Theater Lobby | What We Saw

Blank cards are provided for you—the audience—to write down what you observe at the festival, onscreen and off. Leave your card in the box provided at the What We Saw station to be photographed and added to the ongoing slideshow. This presentation is an experimental remix documentary made possible by you: the savvy, diverse, and experimental-film-loving AAFF audience. All are invited.