40th Annual Ann Arbor Film Festival 2002 ---------------------------------------- Checked out the winners shows (8pm & 10pm Sunday). Many people would consider four hours of independent 16mm shorts sheer torture, but this is one of my favorite film events of the year. I like to get a pass and watch all of the screenings throughout the week. Be sure to bring a penlight and a book though in case there is a long (usually foreign) film that sucks. I like to sit in the balcony first row and line up a vast array of junk food on the ledge and put my feet up. You can also volunteer to usher to get a pass to the festival. But if you just want to check out a slice of independent film to see what it is all about, check out one of the winners shows the last day of the festival. Will review a reasonable variety of films so you can get an idea of what it is like. Usually the films range from 2 minutes to 50 minutes and the average film time is 10 minutes. The films range from animation to documentary to experimental to narrative. During the winners show, they will show only one film that is 30 minutes or longer so that you can get a good variety. You will usually see about 10 films. Films are submitted from all over the world. Usually about 40-50 films win prizes & thousands of dollars in prize money is handed out. Vicki Honeyman organizes the thing every year & does an amazing job. Highlights: Wrestling Vessels by Lisa Yu, Los Angeles ----------------------------------------- best film of the show (in my opinion) by this chick in at UCLA. a gross weird claymation thing featuring figures doing the nasty and melting into each other and the furniture like some orgasmic symphonic crescendo (featuring jizz that looks like liquid jello spattered and oozing against the walls and flying through the air). The scrogging figures feature retractable body hair that gets sucked into the body and then out the chick's ass into a big monster pubic hair ball. yipes! surreal stuff. Also features pottery with an elemental life of its own with ghost prints and clawmarks in the clay made by invisible forces and then smoothed out and erased, accompanied by grunting and other base animal noises. give me some of whatever you guys were on! film won 1K for most promising filmmaker Take Me Home, Matt Hulse, Scotland ---------------------------------- This visual art film is about a naked Scot who is wonderingly wandering all over this farm in and out of various spaces that he tehnically should not even be able to get into. There is one part where he puts on a rabbit costume and goes for a walk in the woods. Right at this point, an actual naked dude, wanders across the Michigan theatre stage. The crowd goes wild digging the interactive performance art ala Rocky Horror (plus the dude was totally hot!) coincidentally won $500 Tios hot & spicy award Tsipa & Volf by Daniel Gamburg, San Francisco --------------------------------------------- Crushingly sad yet brilliant film that takes footage of a guy's grandparents over the years (they are Jewish emigrants from Latvia now living in San Fran) so that you can see the decline of the grandfather with Alzheimer's. In the earlier footage, he is spry and clever so it is really sad to see. Also, the grandfather talks about how his first wife and child were killed during WWII and the grandmother talks about how her first husband and children were killed during the war. They got together because they were both alone though it was never a mad, flaming love like their first marriages were. This is more of a relationship of survival and commitment that evolved over 50 years. People were weeping during this thing. Won 1K for best documentary Attempt? Jessica Weinberg, Ann Arbor, MI ---------------------------------------- Film about a chick who doesn't fit in, she tries but is on the fringe. Shows various acts of not fitting in throughout her life- feeling alienated and different at the corporate lunch table, etc. Interesting scene where she finds that the only reason for her to get out of bed is that she has to take a profound leak. She rolls out of bed onto the floor making her way with great effort through a vast slog of packing peanuts in slow motion. The best part is at a party when she is a young girl. she digs this guy Peter but he is making out with some hot chick instead. The hot chick dogs her later and says, 'Come on now, don't pout. Peter doesn't like pouty girls'. She says, 'Well, then Peter can go fuck himself'. This swirls into an ultra-smarmy 70's folk song with the lyrics 'Peter, go fuck yourself, go fuck yourself, you selfish pig' with the audience singing along. Won $500 for best Michigan filmmaker. Fishers of Dar, Lina fruzzetti, Akos Ostor, Steven Ross, Providence, RI --------------------------- Film that shows daily life in an urban fishing village near Tanzania. Shows all aspects including the fishing, fishing boat maintenance, the bartering at the market, the preparing of the fish. Nothing goes to waste here since they use the trim for fertilizer. The contrast of the grim peacefulness of the sea with the bustling market and colorful outfits is cool. The way they kill crabs is remarkably grotesque since the crabs skitter out from under the hammer repeatedly, then get pulled back and hit again. There is a big pile of crabs with their legs still twitching even though they are dead. Yech, there must be a better way. Film won 1K for best cinematography With Me, Kerstin Cmelka, Vienna, Austria ---------------------------------------- No clue how this chick even made this film, but it is a dreamlike thing on her bed involving her sleeping, her astral form splitting off & going to the other side of the bed, then she goes down on herself. Amazing. why even bother having conversations with guys? she must have filmed one set of motions, then the other set of motions on top of the same roll of film, then developed it. perfectly blocked. incredible. won $166 for one of three most technically innovative films The Velvet Tigress, Jen Sachs, Los Angeles ------------------------------------------ nifty black and white animated number that catches circa 1931 glamour and corruption, based on the headline story of the Winnie Ruth Judd 'Trunk Murders' trial. A chick blows away two of her chick friends in a drug-induced fit of jealousy. don't trade guys at parties if you've been doing the hard stuff! she chops her former friends into pieces and stuffs them in two steamer trunks, packing them off on a train headed west. The main question is why she went with them since by the time the trunks made it to california, they were leaking and attracting flies. she tries to get people to help her out while everything is falling apart & ends up in one hell of a court case sensation. film won 1K for best animated film Reaper, Sheeper, Treasure Seeker, Dave Lieber, NY --------------- spunky claymation dealie about Death, a sheep, and four pirates. Death is a basic 9-5 scythe-toting guy who has a beer at the end of a long day of crossing people off his list. He travels via a nifty portal doorway (with a skull knob) that sometimes spins, sometimes wafts up through the ground, and sometimes slinks in like a snail. No dialogue, just a few basic sounds (whoosh, baa! & arrrgh!); relies on visuals to convey the message. Won $100 for honorable mention. Contrafacta, Roberto Ariganello and Chris Gehman, Toronto ------- This film was cool, though did not win anything. Took images from medieval illuminated art, quotations from mystics and poets, & snatches of period music & did a bunch of surreal stuff like heads splitting open and demons flying out, and nuns working in a field harvesting heads, throwing them into a basket. Like Monthy Python art vignettes cubed, but more trippy than silly. Weird shite. The best thing about it was that there was no background narration, so the images just make their impact on your subconscious mind. Pie Fight '69, Sam Green & Christian Bruno, San Fran --------------------------- Documentary film did not win any awards though was cool. A group of independent filmmakers get a truckload of pies on the opening night of the 1969 San Francisco International film festival and let them fly in order to protest the burgeoise aspect of the event. They used six cameras to film the debacle and the reactions of offended snobs. They even had an actor portraying the 'sad clown of life' doing a mournful dance with a broom pretending to sweep up the vast mess on the steps of the theatre.