Ann Arbor Film Festival 2009

Texts from the 1969 American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz and letters from supporters propel an exploration of political yearning, emancipatory architecture and failed utopias. What does it mean to claim land that has more value as a symbol than as a potential home? And how does that symbol function beyond the boundaries of its geographic limits?

A brief glimpse into the lives of four young filmmakers who happen to be refugees.

Más Se Perdió (we lost more) draws connections between a series of places in Havana, Cuba, each of which have a relationship to notions of utopia.

This film revolves around a series of photographs taken in Cairo (Egypt), all of which depict couples courting along Cairo's main bridges. The narrator discovers similar photographs which were left behind in a photo-lab but never picked up. They belonged to a press-photographer who had since gone missing.

Portraits in miniature of one mass murderer and two serial killers in the 1970s, against the backdrop of the Santa Cruz, California mountain landscape they emerged from. Bodies masked in film grain and murky forest light, a prosaic evocation of place, and a muddy sense of "then" and "now."

A meditation on the milieu of "elevated threat" which addresses national identity, gun culture, wilderness, consumption, patriotism and the possibility of personal transcendence. Of particular interest are the ways Americans have come to understand freedom and the increasingly technological reiterations of manifest destiny.

A portrait of life in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia where the inhabitants contend with the debris left behind by years of Hydrogen-bomb testing a half a century earlier.

An ode to the counterculture of the 80s and 90s, a time when uncovering quality in culture was a real treasure hunt.

On the 13th of each month, hundreds of people gather at a site in the Mojave Desert to see visions of the Virgin Mary appear in the sun. They point Polaroid, cell phone, and video cameras at the sun, and compare interpretations of the resulting images.