Ann Arbor is home to the world’s oldest experimental film festival and the fourth-oldest film festival in North America. This year, the Michigan Daily once again sent the Film Beat to cover the insightful and complicated medium that is experimental filmmaking at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. From collections of short films, to surrealist experimentations in cinematography, to silent character studies, join us as we take part in the 61st year of this historic festival.
— Zach Loveall, Film Beat Editor
Films in Competition 2
The Ann Arbor Film Festival’s series of short film competitions showcases the beauty and unique nature of experimental film. The festival’s Films in Competition 2 session featured seven films ranging from five minutes to around half an hour. Each film was completely different in style and theme, requiring me to constantly readjust. From the pastels of “Roses, Pink and Blue” to the startling acoustics of “South Los Angeles Street” to the microscopic visuals of “2cent / 10coil,” I attempted to create meaning through my own interpretations, story-searching in the darkness of the Michigan Theater.
Read more from Laura Millar here.
“Diòba”
This is my second year watching a film in the “Feature in Competition” category for the Ann Arbor Film Festival. It is also the second year I’ve had no idea what was going on in the film I watched. “Diòba,” by debut filmmaker Adriana Rojas Espitia, focuses on small moments in the days of an old woman’s life. The viewers, however, are not given much information about this woman. We don’t know why she lives alone in the forest. Much is left up to interpretation, and the film’s abstractness leaves too much unexplained. I never fully connected with the main character, Elba (Inés Góez Cortes, Debut), because I knew as little about her at the end of the film as I did in the beginning.
Read more from Zara Manna here.
“Up The River With Acid”
Hutter chose a deeply personal subject for his first feature: his mother (Francine-Y Prévost) and father (Horst Hutter). “Up The River With Acid” follows Horst, a former professor who suffers from dementia, in his retirement in his wife’s French village. Francine is a poet, and the audience is privy to some of her moving words that carry profound longing and tenderness. In our brief conversation after the film’s screening, she was as wise and lovely as she appears on-screen.
Read more from Maya Ruder here.
“Super Natural”
Have you ever been forced to watch a meditation video against your will? Gathered in a room and told that if you watch this 15-minute video, all of your problems might go away? It works for a while. You take a moment to relax, stop everything and breathe. But then it goes on for a bit too long. You start worrying about all the things you have to get done, and you end up more stressed than when you began. “Super Natural,” a film by Portuguese filmmaker Jorge Jácome (“Past Perfect”) playing at this year’s Ann Arbor Film Festival, is the 85-minute version of that experience.
Read more from Mitchel Green here.
“Darkness, Darkness Burning Bright”
When I walked into the auditorium of the School of Kinesiology for the Ann Arbor Film Festival’s showing of “Darkness, Darkness Burning Bright,” I expected to watch a movie. Little did I know that I was in for a 70-minute experimental compilation of the natural world, distorted beyond recognition, plot lines be damned. The exhibition of wild cinematographic techniques was set to an eerie, clanking score akin to a creepily unorthodox rendition of “The Conjuring.” “Darkness” prioritized exploratory film design over any sense of a moral or message. It was the most boring masterpiece I have ever seen.
Read more from Abigail Goodman here.
“Berbû”
“Do you think it will be war?” young bride-to-be Gûle (Kajeen Aloush, debut) asks her older sister. A pause.
“It already is war,” her sister replies.
So begins “Berbû,” Sevinaz Evdike’s dazzling directorial debut, which had its American premiere this Thursday at the Ann Arbor Film Festival.
“Berbù,” which clocks in at just 70 minutes, is a deeply personal portrait of the ongoing Syrian civil war. The film is set in Serekaniye, a Syrian border town constantly besieged by neighboring Turkish forces. The film opens in Gûle’s tidy family home, where preparations for her upcoming wedding are in full swing. The everyday bustle is brought to a halt when her fiance and his family arrive to pose a single question: Has the war become bad enough to postpone the wedding?
Read more from Lola D’Onofrio here.