Ann Arbor Film Festival 2010

In Thieves like me, German film artist Matthias Müller will talk about his work and show his recent 35mm films (co-directed by Christoph Girardet) including Mirror (8 min, 2003), Kristall (14 min, 2006) and Contre-jour (10 min, 2009). A special presentation of Müller’s earlier 16mm films screens on Saturday, March 27th at 12:30pm in the Michigan Theater Screening Room.

A man faces his approaching death. He takes a journey, his last perhaps, and ends up at the “Pensão Globo” in Lisbon, where he sets out on aimless excursions through the city. The film depicts a life in a state of transition. “Sometimes it’s like I’m already gone, become a ghost of myself.” -MM

In Penumbra the camera strategy, and shooting scheme, are rigidly determined by the film’s subject, a grid of off-white bathroom tiles. The work is formed as a continuously evolving image. In other words it has neither cuts nor dissolves, both of which affect the transition from one shot to another, but exists as a single fixed shot made with a static camera. Penumbra’s spatio-temporal grid structure parallels the structure of the filmstrip, which is similarly grid-like: spatial in its actual physical form, spatio-temporal in its manner of operation. -Nicky Hamlyn

Shot primarily from a helicopter, Peter Mettler’s startling documentary offers an unparalleled view of the world’s largest industrial, capital and energy project. Canada’s tar sands are an oil reserve the size of England. Extracting the crude oil called bitumen from underneath unspoiled wilderness requires a massive industrialized effort with far-reaching impacts on the land, air, water, and climate. It’s an extraordinary spectacle, whose scope can only be understood from far above.

Looking for photographs of Jesus, yetis and Hitler in 1948? Help is at hand with this documentary-fantasy based on true stories of requests for impossible images. Real-life archives become the stage where fact and fiction collide, belief runs amok and unruly images have a life of their own.

Moving from east to west and back, the windows of a bus frame fleeting sections of urban landscape. Throughout the day, images of riders, textures of light and fragments of bodies in space come together to weave a portrait in motion; a contemplative meditation on public transport in the city of Los Angeles. Isolation, routine and everyday splendor, create the backdrop of this journey, while the intermittent sounds of cars construct the soundscape.

Pistrino is assembled from time-lapse footage shot in Italy over the last three years. I am interested in how the relative values of light and shade are transformed in certain images of natural objects and related phenomena, so that, for example, a shadow becomes at least as strong as the object which casts it. This has the effect of complicating the reading of a given image, as well as creating a new kind of image from the interactions between objects and the shadows they cast. In some of the shots am also interested in how the perceptibility of grain is affected by light and focus levels. -Nicky Hamlyn

Tsuji's beautiful, haunted charcoal animation portrays an angel, a gathering in a forest and an otherworldly visitation to a couple in their home.