Ann Arbor Film Festival 2009

In RiP: A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers. The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil’s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride. A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film. With RiP: A remix manifesto, Gaylor and Girl Talk sound an urgent alarm and draw the lines of battle. Co-Presented by: Arts Alliance Sponsored by: MetroTimes

Found footage of the 1941 lobotomy of Rosemary Kennedy is interwoven with an account of the American psychosurgery movement of the 30s and 60s.

A portrait of lives linked by a self-storage warehouse becomes a personal exploration of memory and loss.

Adeel Alam, a devout Muslim-American and professional wrestler, struggles to find a balance between his faith and his wrestling career. However, in order to advance in the world of wrestling he must enact the troubling stereotype of a Terrorist.

Havana, Cuba. The film's director returns to the island to meet the film's protagonist, Tommy, a onetime dancer at the Cuban national opera house who is HIV positive. In this film he talks about love and his sense of longing as he shares his life with us.

Built in 2005, more than twice the size of the Mall of America, the South China Mall outside of Guangzhou in southern China was designed as a celebration of middle-class consumption and spectacle. Often evoked as a symbol of China's economic emergence as a superpower, the reality is much more complex. Four years after it opened, the South China Mall sits almost empty, a foreboding metaphor for the future of global capitalism.

A day trip to Suffolk, to see my friend Ben and his dad Oleg…