by ·Comments Off on Ann Arbor Film Fest 2023, part 1

I’d heard vaguely about this festival, figuring it was just another regional film fest like Atlanta but hopefully better, but suddenly I discover it’s “the oldest avant-garde and experimental film festival in North America” and that most of its programming is available online for cheap, so here we go! Alas, I tried everything to get screenshots but no luck.

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Grasshopper (Jussi Eerola)

Abandoned commercial mall, the window-covering peels back and an unpopulated flashing-light dance party begins. The light rigs are often visible, and motion gets sped up and reversed. I would’ve preferred if they actually blasted dance music and re-recorded it reverberaating through these spaces, but it’s just clean techno on the soundtrack. The Finnish director previously made a TIFF documentary about nuclear power.

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Language Unknown (Janelle VanderKelen)

Fade in on a fuzzy brain, pull out from a Blue Velvet ear in a field. Stop-motion eyeball in a time-lapse flower. Beautiful mushroom blooms. The spacey sounds and film scratches give the impression of a 1970’s plant invasion horror. She previously made a movie about a slug.

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To Do (Saul Pankhurst)

Guy murmurs through wakeup routine then brings up The Daily Calm which triggers a high-speed desktop-cutout animation while he rattles off a to-do list (“cancel amazon prime, acknowledge my disempowering habits”). Very playful and short, the only one I watched twice. Saul’s got a fair number of things on vimeo.

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Aralkum (Daniel Asadi Faezi & Mila Zhluktenko)

“Only humans remained” – a sad extinction story. But in the next scene there are farm animals. Drones stalk landlocked boats. Titles tell us about Aral Desert plant life and personal stories from when the Aral Desert was the Aral Sea, which we finally see in windowboxed archive footage, in all its fish-filled glory. Sad organ music and a sad-eyed man let us know that the desertification is a sad thing. Daniel previously made a short about a valley that became a lake, so these two films balance out.

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Glazing (Lilli Carré)

Nude animation, a woman changing forms by hurling herself against the walls, short and good. The director also has books (out of print) from Fantagraphics and teaches in Los Angeles.

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Eclipsis (Tania Hernández Velasco)

Nervous string music and whispering narrator accompanies a study of Mexican butterflies, a report on one non-migratory monarch who can only be distinguished from others by ultraviolet light, and their hallucinogenic effect on humans. Then unfortunately the music goes away and we spend some time in close-up with a dancer pretending to be a butterfly. Some nice prismatic insect-eye views and wing pattern closeups. She previously made an hourlong leftist farming documentary.

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Diomysus (Emily Elizabeth Morus-Jones)

Short interview doc on polyamory using mouse puppets. A bit of silliness.

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11 (Vuk Jevremovic)

Peak animation by Vuk, absolutely wild color and lines and paint, even a callback to his Panther. I’d like it even more if it wasn’t about how soccer is the representation and culmination of all global endeavor, with huge bombastic music.

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Super Natural (Jorge Jácome)

I’m lumping the two features I started watching in with the shorts, since I only sampled them. Normally this would mean I wouldn’t include them at all, but it’s my blog, and I can change the rules if I want.

Very patience-testing intro, soft new-age music with subtitled conversation about nothing under softly shifting color fields with major banding issues. Then surveillance footage, then video of dudes sleeping and sea spiders, the subtitles all vaguely friendly affirmations accompanied by an electro-chirp sound. It’s weirdly peaceful but entirely useless to me – I imagine the World’s Fair girl falling asleep to it. I did enjoy some drawings of birds as seen through a spherical magnifier, but at the half-hour chapter heading I skipped to the end.

I guess this was about disability and affect. Jácome is Portuguese, had a previous feature with a confusing plot description on the Criterion channel.

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Roses, Pink and Blue (Julia Yezbick)

Ringing drone sounds with singing at the end, one-word-at-a-time titles telling the story of a girl’s balloon that flew away on a beach trip. No big deal. Our friend the psychedelic monarch butterfly makes a brief appearance. Yezbick has worked with the Sensory Ethnography Lab.

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South Los Angeles Street (Leighton Pierce)

The Avant-Garde Balcony Movie, sans conversations with neighbors, just perched at a window watching cars and helicopters. The description calls it “acoustically rich and visually stunning,” but I wouldn’t. First I’ve seen from Pierce since Nashville in 2008.

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Arrest in Flight (Adrian Flury)

A seeming reference to the Battles video I watched last week, the one with the escalator. Someone is having a helluva time glitching out their 3D software… but there’s also stop-motion in here and it’s upsetting when I can’t tell which is which. Chairs and stairs and a vacuum-powered pair of legs cavort in a a dollhouse set. Otherworldly. Swiss.

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Mangrove School (Filipa César)

Mangrove leaves make excellent cable ties. Long take of someone tying up branches while a voiceover tells us the Portuguese tried to murder children by bombing schools when Guinea was fighting for independence. More quiet branch work by the river, making me very sleepy until it ends with applause. César’s feature Spell Reel is on my radar, and the cinematographer worked on Outside Noise.

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Camera Test (Siegfried A. Fruhauf)

A nice eyewash/brainwash… green leader, quick L-R shot out a train window, black, same shot flopped R-L, green, etc, etc, with chugging train(?) noise on the soundtrack. Water and trees, with less horizontal motion in the middle half. Fruhauf has made dozens of shorts, some collected on an Index DVD.

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2 Cent 10 Coil (Monteith McCollum)

Black-masked strips of printed words telling of a trip to Alaska. Extreme textural closeups of who-knows-what, objects that seem to breathe, microscope exams of stamps and coins. Reminds me I haven’t seen anything by David Gatten in a while. The closing credits tell us the source of all texts and tools and objects, nice.

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No Thoughts Head Empty (Quinn Franks)

Machinima Velma has a migraine.

by ·Comments Off on This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese)

4:3, excellent color, trendy arthouse long takes, unusual sound mix. Great looking/sounding, reminds of Jauja. Per the commentary, the trajectory of the long takes were designed to mirror cycles of life.

She is Mantoa, is told her son has died (in her introduction scene, the movie’s best), and that the town will be resettled and a dam built. Enter a low-voiced narrator, and another entry in the “rural woman goes to the city and deals w bureaucracy” genre, more enjoyable at least than A Gentle Creature. Her house burns down. A kid dies. It is a burial, pretty much.

by ·Comments Off on Navalvy (2022, Daniel Roher)

Watched this the night before it won the oscar. I was rooting for All That Breathes, not because I’d watched it yet but because it has birds. No birds here, just a Russian man with great popular support, considered the best hope against Putin. The movie follows from his sudden illness on a flight to Siberia, through his recovery in Europe and the investigation into whether he was poisoned, through his triumphant hero’s return to Russia… haha just kidding, he was arrested immediately and will be in prison indefinitely. Pretty good doc, most notable for having footage of Navalny prank-calling his suspected assassins into revealing exactly how they attempted to kill him (underpants poisoning) and cover it up. The director previously made a doc about The Band, but I should really watch The Last Waltz first.

by ·Comments Off on All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022, Laura Poitras)

Katy and I enjoyed some oscar-nominated docs the week of the awards. This is a structurally satisfying doc about Nan Goldin’s life and art and activism through three health epidemics: the mental health crisis that took her sister, AIDS which took many of her friends, and her own opioid addiction, for which she seeks revenge through public protests to convince museums to refuse Sackler drug money.

Matthew Eng for Reverse Shot:

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed retains the impassioned clarity of Poitras’s style while enlisting its primary subject as its co-author. Goldin provides illuminating, clarifying, and always candid commentary on the many chapters of her life in one-on-one interviews with Poitras, conducted on weekends during COVID, included here under the agreement that Goldin would have final say over which of her words were included in the finished film. (She also served as a music consultant on the film, compiling an eclectic playlist that ranges from The Velvet Underground and A Taste of Honey to Lucinda Williams and The Facts of Life’s Charlotte Rae, singing the Brechtian ballad that inspired the title of Goldin’s landmark exhibition, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.) A great deal of Poitras’s film is fittingly composed of Goldin’s work, presented to the audience in the photographer’s preferred format: the slideshow, which has long been the crux of Goldin’s practice. It is a simple yet immensely effective device—its clicks evince a pleasing tactility—that lets Goldin’s photography speak for itself and enhances the attention-seizing potency of her portraiture with its stark staging, electric colors, and magnetic characters.

Won the top prize at Venice against all the big oscar dramas (Tár, Banshees, The Whale), the arthouse faves (No Bears, Saint Omer) and the would-be contenders (Bones & All, Blonde, Bardo, White Noise). This took three editors: Amy Foote (The Work), Joe Bini (Grizzly Man), Brian Kates (Killing Them Softly). We skipping Risk, not in any hurry to catch up with it, so it felt like Poitras was gone for nearly a decade.

by ·Comments Off on Moosa Lane (2022, Anita Mathal Hopland)

Oops, we picked a bum closing film… should’ve caught Hummingbirds on Thursday, and gone home after Mariachi on Sunday. Living Hour was good at least – a chill 5-piece from Winnipeg. Norwegian-Pakistani-Danish filmmaker visits her dad’s family in Pakistan over 15 years, watching her cousins grow up and start their own families and/or die young from cancer. Weak attempt to universalize the story via poetic narration about othering and inbetweenness, really it’s just home movies.

Hopland has previously made her own variation on The Road Movie with On the Edge of Freedom, a portrait of Russian stunt jumpers that’s been described as “a one hour compilation of a bunch of YouTube videos.” The producer worked on a Mads Brügger movie I haven’t seen, and the editor also did Venus.

by ·Comments Off on Going Varsity in Mariachi (2022, Alejandra Vasquez & Sam Osborn)

All Night Trio is two keyboardists and a very good drummer. Exactly the senior-year inspirational skill-competition movie we signed up for. One guy gets kicked off the team for slacking then pulls himself together. Two girls are in a relationship. One is a dedicated leader. The coach talks of using this determination and teamwork and self-improvement in later life. Everyone cries, eventually, even those of us attempting to wear face masks in the theater.

The directors’ first film, but they had the Impact team on their side (Athlete A, Queen of Versailles, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, Procession).

by ·Comments Off on Feet in Water, Head on Fire (2023, Terra Long)

From the Blue Note balcony, feat. Landlady again. Hand-processed(?) 16mm shot in Coachella Valley, CA. Date palms, fault lines, Salton Sea. Local culture in form of a Scheherazade parade. Interviews with a shopkeeper and the current and former owners of date farms. A sloth, a parrot. A real inventory of things – the look of the film and its location holding all the things together, but just barely.

by ·Comments Off on Ramona (2023, Victoria Linares Villegas)

Landlady aka Abstract White opened with a nice improv set, as we sat down in front at the Blue Note. Solid film, made by professionals, unlike certain other things we’ve seen this week. Fiction about a pregnant teen runaway hoping to become a movie star. Lead actress Camila wants to meet actual pregnant teens and have discussions to understand her character. In the second half of the movie the actually-pregnant kids take over and start playing the roles. Dominican Republic, all lower-class girls whose moms also got pregnant young and were hoping to break the cycle, but it’s established that all the local males are shits. Victoria’s second feature after It Runs in the Family, which she brought back to the fest this year along with a key influence, Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence.

by ·Comments Off on Milisuthando (2023, Milisuthando Bongela)

The Onions opened, incongruously to the film, three goofy white guys playing bright pop songs. Movie starts with a way-zoomed-in cellphone video of a woman disrobing before a Mandela statue. Director’s family is from South Africa, grandma disparages Mandela for ending apartheid. Then we get educational segments on history of the black-only Transkei district, featuring excessively unedited news archives interviewing relentlessly optimistic Black kids and their parents on the eve of integration. Movie goes off the rails with two (not just one!) extended conversations between the filmmaker and her white friends about privilege and prejudice revealed by some minor personal interactions, the visual in these sections just subtitles over an annoyingly dark-grey screen with a couple lines visible on the edges.