Donald Harrison: The Ann Arbor Film Festival is the longest running independent and experimental film festival in North America.  It has an incredible legacy and history with independent cinema.  It goes back to 1963 and it has a history of showing the early work of artist such as Yoko Ono, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, even George Lucas showed a student version of his first feature film.  And that spirit and tradition very much continues to this day 

And so our festival is showing a lot of short films.  It’s showing a lot of work that’s going to be pushing boundaries, breaking new ground and we have a big audience.  We have a great audience.  And so that’s pretty rare for you to be able to make a five-minute film, come to a festival like ours, which has the Michigan Theater and to be able to have a big audience to celebrate that work with you.

The Ann Arbor Film Festival is involved with the university in a number of different ways.  The School of Art and Design, the Screen Arts and Cultures Department, the Center for Japanese Studies is helping to bring in an artist from Japan for a feature film that he has been animating for 10 years, Keita Kurosaka.  The Confucius Institute and the Center for Chinese Studies are supporting a feature documentary called “Disorder”, which is going to be a really powerful film.

The film festival has some of our screeners that are part of the university.  We’re actually going to be world premiering a film by the University of Michigan faculty named Alexis Bravos, a short film about the Sculptor Barbara Hepworth.  This year, we’re bringing in Sam Green who’s a University of Michigan alumni and he is going to be featured as the Penny Stamps program to perform a live documentary with a band from New York.

We’re also doing a special retrospective of this short film, so definitely it would encourage people not to miss that.  The Penny Stamps program is free to the public.  We also offer eight other free programs throughout the week.  So there’s really no reason not to come down and check out what’s going on.  There’s a group we’re bringing in that we’re excited about with again art design support at the university called “Telco Systems”.  They’re coming in from the Netherlands and they are really exploring what’s possible within sound, visuals, and they say that they test the limits of the Human Sensory Apparatus.

The festival is an Academy qualifying festival.  So if you win Best Animation, or Best Narrative, or Best Experimental Film, or Best of the Festival Award, you can qualify your film for Oscar nomination and there’s not a lot of festivals that have that distinction.
We also give out $20,000.00 in awards to filmmakers, which is significant for a lot of these makers to win a thousand dollar price.  It helps encourage them to make that next piece.

This year, we received approximately 2500 submissions for consideration from 70 different countries and of those, we’re going to end up showing close to a 120 films in the awards competition and another 50 or 60 films that we create in the special programs.

So a total of 40 programs, six days, almost 200 films.  There’s plenty for people to come in and celebrate with us.

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