Congratulations to our friends at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, celebrating their 50th year with over 250 films, videos, installations and live performances and more than 30 U.S., North American or world premieres. The Festival kicks off Tuesday March 27th and continues through Sunday, April 1st. We are thrilled that this year's fest will showcase a number of VDB new releases in competition including:
- Ceibas: Epilogue, The Well of Representation, Evan Meaney, 2011
- Tin Pressed, Dani Leventhal, 2011
- The Evil Eyes, Bobby Abate, 2011
- Village, silenced, Deborah Stratman, 2011
- Remote, Jesse McClean, 2011
- 20 Hz, Semiconductor, 2011
The festival will also include new work by VDB artists Mike Hoolboom (Forest Walk) and Kevin Everson (Chevelle), as well as George Kuchar's film classic Hold Me While I'm Naked.
There are also plenty of other VDB related events at the Festival this year:
Poetic Injustice: Short Films from the Arab World: "Curator Irina Leimbacher will present films and videos from the past 25 years from Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, and Morocco. From familial intimacies to unfamiliar leaps of the imagination, from straightforward cartographic narratives to twisted and brilliant allegories, these six works each forcefully and passionately evokes political realities that, for the most part, still define our world today." Walid Raad's The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs and Mona Hatoum's Measures of Distance will be featured in the curated program.
Michael Robinson: Juror Presentation: "Since the year 2000, Michael Robinson has created a body of film, video andphotography work exploring the joys and dangers of mediated experience; cultivating new resonances between seemingly disparate elements and reconfiguring artifacts of the too-recent past." VDB artist Michael Robinson will serve as one of three jurors for the 50th AAFF.
The Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award for Emerging Experimental Video Artist: "This award intends to provide support to the most promising video artist at the inception of her/his career. Distributed by the Video Data Bank, the award was conceived by the Aronofsky family to honor the late Barbara Aronofsky Latham, a Chicago-based experimental video artist who passed away in 1984." VDB is glad to continue to administrate this award on behalf of the Barbara Aronofsky Latham Estate through the AAFF. Keep an eye out for this year's winner!
Future of Preservation- Panel & Screening: "Film preservationists Mark Toscano (Academy Film Archive) and Ross Lipman(UCLA Film & Televsion Archive) will be joined by Tom Colley, Collection Manager at Video Data Bank, to discuss the current state of film and video preservation, the future directions of archiving film, video and digital media and dispensing practical advice for artists to preserve their own moving-image work. Each will be screening, in whole or part, a recently preserved film or video." Please join VDB's own Tom Colley for this discussion panel and check out some newly preserved work we've recently unearthed!