THURSDAY, MARCH 28 TRAILERS & EVENT LISTINGS:

AAFF Screeners Get-Together hosted by InfoReady
Off the Screen! Salon Session
10 am-12 pm | Space 2435 North Quad | Free
Everyone is encouraged to attend this free, public, informational meet-and-greet. This includes the AAFF screening cadre and anyone interested in joining! Learn more about the AAFF film review process, give feedback on past experiences, and discuss upcoming screening opportunities.

Juror Presentation: Stacy Steers: Animation and Surrealism  
1 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room | Free
Stacey Steers presents four short animated films spanning 20 years of process-focused filmmaking. In her handmade films, Steers experiments with new forms of animation in the surrealist tradition, using found footage in a novel way to create provocative narratives. Her mesmerizing films move with a stream-of-consciousness fluidity and summon disquieting dreamscapes drawn from allegory, myth, and archetype.   

Off the Screen! reception with work by Sara Bonaventura, Peter Bussigel, Stephan Moore, McLean Fahnestock, Sarah Friedland, and James Snazell, featuring a Milk Drops 2 performance by James Snazell
Reception
3-5 pm | Ann Arbor Art Center
Milk Drops 2 (James Snazell) is a live cinema work that highlights a duel between a 16mm projector and a digital recording from a 16mm analytic projector. It explores using milk as film emulsion.

Meow Wolf
Penny W. Stamps Lecture Series
5:10 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium | Free
The speaker series presents the Meow Wolf Collective, represented by two of its members: Chris Cloud (Meow Wolf marketing director) and Morgan Capps (co-director of the film Meow Wolf: Origin Story). Founded in 2008 as an art collective for DIY artists in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Meow Wolf creates immersive, multimedia experiences that transport audiences of all ages into fantastic realms of storytelling. Housed in a converted bowling alley, Meow Wolf welcomes members of the general public into their fantastical world of art installations, video and music production, and extended reality content. Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return is a unique art experience featuring an astonishing new form of non-linear storytelling that unfolds through exploration, discovery, and 21st-century interactivity to inspire visitors of all ages. The group’s 2018 independent documentary film, Meow Wolf: Origin Story, takes viewers through the meteoric rise of the penniless, anarchic art collective as it attracted the support of author George R.R. Martin (Game of Thrones), morphing into a multimillion dollar corporation in just a few short years. Meow Wolf: Origin Story will be the Midnight Movie on Friday, March 29.

Found Sounds: A Retrospective of Barbara Meter’s Avant-Garde Films
Special Program
7 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
In the early 1970s, Barbara Meter -- who was born in the Netherlands in 1939 -- co-founded the Electric Cinema as a critical response to the commercialization of film production and programming. Run by members of the Amsterdamse Film Coop and the Studio for the Development of Film and Film Manifestations, the theater became the epicenter of Dutch independent and avant-garde filmmaking. At the Electric Cinema, Meter curated international avant-garde and expanded cinema programs. She later co-created Political Kinema and made documentaries as part of activist and feminist movements. In her avant-garde films, Meter pushes the cinematic medium forward with her unique way of repurposing documents and audio recordings, utilizing an innovative, masterful application of optical printing techniques. After many years of work, the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam has preserved Meter’s films in all their delicacy and complexity. Tonight’s all-celluloid special program is curated and presented by Monica Savirón and organized in partnership with EYE Filmmuseum.

Films in Competition 5: Out Night
7:15pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
The 18th annual celebration of queer cinema at AAFF spotlights recent experimental films with LGBTQ themes: Mom's Clothes (Jordan Wong), Pirate Boys (Pol Merchan), La Mesa (Adrian Garcia Gomez), Three Centimeters (Laura Zeidan), beside the water, 1999–2004 (Finn Paul), Flowers (Vado Vergara), The Eddies (Madsen Minax). Programmed by Sean Donovan. 

Wonders Wander with Succulent Humans
9 pm | Michigan Theater Screening Room
In Succulent Humans (Luciano Zubillaga and Dew Kim), a mysterious cameraperson stalks queer performer hornyhonydew (aka artist Dew Kim) from a skyscraper overlooking Beijing's Central Television Building, and opens up to another dimension of spacetime, where narrative is replaced by telepathic voices about aliens, sexual monsters, and the queerest of battles. And Wonders Wander (Shu Lea Cheang) is a location-based mobi-web-serial with four fictional episodes set in Madrid. Departing from the city’s Malasaña Barrio, which became known as Maravillas (Wonders) during the 1980s countercultural movement known as La Movida Madrileña. Wonders Wander takes the wonders out of Malasaña to explore the off-the-mainstream nouveau queer generation.

Films in Competition 6
9:15 pm | Michigan Theater Main Auditorium
Recent experimental, documentary, and animated films: Running in Circles (Ei Toshinari and Duy Nguyen), Traces With Elikem (Ariana Gerstein), The Motorcyclist (Ben Bruhmuller), Walker's (Kyle Myers-Haugh), Je sors acheter des cigarettes (Osman Cerfon), Hämeenkyrö Redux (Scott Northrup), Screen (Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller), Mattress@Day (Jakub Kalousek)

Afterparty
9 pm-1 am | \aut\ Bar | Free
Featuring Project MAMA II: Above Board (Carlos and Leanna Rosas) consisting of short motion graphics and animated works by selected artists projected on the media art mobile attack (mama) unit’s main sail.

For tickets to the Ann Arbor Film Fest, click here for individual events; for full or weekend passes, click here. Use code AAFF57_AADL to get a discount on tickets and passes. Visit aafilmfest.org for more info.
Trailers for: March 26 | March 27 | March 29 | March 30 | March 31
Click here for the landing page for our 57th Ann Arbor Film Festival.