The 63rd AAFF is dedicated to regional filmmaker, painter, and educator Joseph Bernard

Joseph Bernard (1941–2025) was a Detroit-based experimental filmmaker and artist, originally from Port Chester, NY, whose work bridged painting and film with a vivid and rhythmic collage sensibility that informed all of his art. He earned a BFA from the University of Hartford and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied under avant-garde luminary Stan Brakhage. Bernard made over 100 Super 8 films from 1976 to the late 1980s. His film work has been screened internationally, including a retrospective at the 52nd Ann Arbor Film Festival. In 2007, after 35 years of teaching, he retired as a professor emeritus of fine art from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. In 2015, 40 of his films were placed with the Academy Film Archive at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He spent the past several years with his wife in Troy, MI, revisiting his earlier works and exploring new approaches to image-making, bringing the parts to a whole. He will be missed.

Bernard’s film Diversion will be shown in memoriam to conclude the Films in Competition 1 screening on Tuesday, March 25, 8:15pm