Ann Arbor Film Festival 2009

This collage-style animation follows a young girls ascension toward adulthood, both sad and hopeful.

Powerful intersections of the personal, political and spatial in relation to worldview and sovereignty. Films in screening order: Inner Machine (Michiel van Bakel) Circles of Confusion (Phoebe Tooke) Limbo of the Infants (David Osit) For You, My People (Jose Pablo Gonzalez) Utopia, Part 3: the World’s Largest Shopping Mall (Sam Green & Carrie Lozano) Cobra Mist (Emily Richardson) lay claim to an island (Chris Kennedy) The Dawn of Jeju 4.3 (Jaehyung Ju) Nora (Alla Kovgan & David Hinton)

Learn how to cook spaghetti with stop-motion maestro PES.

A woman finds a movie-scope from the late 1800s in aunt Nell's closet, which reveals something very special about her great auntie.

Jennifer Reeves’s epic, years-in-the-making When It Was Blue presents an experience of a world that is both visceral and fleeting. Photographed in 16mm over many years in various waters and terrains, an elaborate montage connects diverse ecosystems spanning from the northeastern USA, to Iceland, Canada’s Pacific coast, New Zealand, and Central America. Reeves hand-painted the 16mm film, creating impressionistic textures and colors that mimic the qualities of land, water and trees, and fuse with the photographic imagery. A frenetic, delighted and mournful visual journey ensues through decades and seasons, as if trying to “capture” as much of the natural world as possible before it disappears. Icelandic musician and composer Skúli Sverrisson’s emotive and haunting score brings the internal human experience to this vast world away from home.

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

An experimental animation and a musical are pressed into the form of a romantic comedy that follows a pair of newlyweds as they learn the perils of homeownership and life in general.

Family, identity and home are deconstructed, rebuilt, and then expanded to make room for the new. Films in screening order: Telethon (Kevin Everson) Rooms (Jacob Mendel) Infrastructure (John Carson McCarthy) night side (Rebecca Meyers) A World Rattled of Habit (Ben Rivers) Severing the Soul (Barbara Klutinis) Phantogram (Kerry Laitala) VIOLA: The Traveling Rooms of a Little Giant (Shih-Ting Hung) Temporary Services (Dina Noto) Moments of Considered Time (Arthur Kleinjan) Keep the Home Fires Burning (Ryan O'Toole)