By Joe Miller

For me, the defining film of the 63rd Ann Arbor Film Festival was one that screened on the final night and didn’t receive any awards: The Geneva Mechanism: A Ghost Movie by Péter Lichter. Described as “the ghosts of celluloid return to haunt digital space,” it’s a five-minute-long meditation on an old film projector, shot in black and white and copiously manipulated and de- and re-constructed with digital effects that make it seem as though it’s intruding into our consciousnesses from across the spheres. It’s a fine little film, visually toothsome with a compelling soundtrack of digital noise, but what made it stand out for me was not how it was made, but where it was made: Hungary, a nation ruled by a grifting autocratic regime that the current ruling party in the United States openly admires and aspires to replicate. It flashed like a beacon of hope, an assertion of art from a nation where freedoms and the norms of justice have been eroded, and the fact that it was entirely about a film projector struck me as a nifty symbol for the power of cinema and the film festival itself in the face of despotic onslaughts the likes of which we’re enduring here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. 

The politics of the moment were a negative force seething all around the weeklong festival, defining it by contrast, like a vast and rising storm of authoritarianism swirling around an eye of freedom. I appreciated it when festival director Leslie Raymond acknowledged the elephant in the country during her introductory remarks on opening night, declaring:  “As we witness the dissolution of the known, we witness the creation of the new. Where there is dissolution, let us create the new.” My mind seized on this, twisted it up, and spat it back more darkly as a line from an old song by Argentine singer songwriter Leon Gieco that would ring in my ears for the entire six days of the festival: Gente que avanza se puede matar, pero los pensamientos quedarán, which, translated roughly, means, “People who advance can be killed, but their thoughts will remain.” Which was not an entirely incongruent or unpleasant thought to have while attending the longest-running experimental film festival in North America during this particular moment in history: Gieco wrote and recorded that lyric in 1973, when his country was cascading toward a violently repressive dictatorship that would consume the entire Southern Cone region for years, and that he would have to flee in exile–a bloody epoch during which, despite it all, the Cinemateca in neighboring Uruguay not only continued showing art films but served as a kind of haven for members of the resistance, who could rub shoulders in the theater’s lobby and share information and hope. And now that tiny country is home to one of the strongest democracies on earth. 

There were many moments when, like Raymond in her opening remarks, festival participants openly addressed the illiberal and bigoted assault raging around us and in other parts of the world, most notably and forcefully during Quinn Hunter’s performance, To the Stars (Parable of the Now), in which she read aloud the March 29, 2025 journal entry from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, after which several University of Michigan students marched the theater’s aisles shouting impromptu manifestos against tyranny and bigotry. And also the second-night lecture by Vietnamese filmmaker, feminist, and postcolonial theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha, entitled The Everyday Interval of Resistance, in which she argued that even the smallest, seemingly insignificant act–and most certainly the act of making and observing art–can be a knock against regimes of regression, repression and oppression. (“Art could be the force of change,” she said.)  And that the festival jurors chose Razah-Del / ??? ??, by Maryam Tafakory–an Iranian-made history of Zan, Iran’s first women’s newspaper, told through a proposal for an impossible-to-make film by two schoolgirls inspired by the paper, and the angry responses to their ideas from male readers along with words of support from women–as winner of the Ken Burns Award for Best of the Festival. And in many a comment made in film introductions and during Q&A sessions addressing the worrisome spirit of the times: “Can we make a new reality?”; “We need to carve that space, particularly in a time of oppression”; “We live in a time of great uncertainty”; and even the woman I overheard telling her friend that she intends to withhold her taxes until the administration distributes funds for programs that have been allocated by Congress. 

This was my first time at the Ann Arbor Film Festival (last year I partook of their online option, in which almost all of the films were made available in my own living room for a mere $60; an option that was not made available this year). I feared going in that I would be an unreliable reporter on the proceedings because my knowledge of avant garde cinema more or less ends in the mid-1990s, when I graduated from college; as an undergrad I studied film at the University of Colorado, where Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon taught, and for several years I immersed myself in experimental film, taking their classes and religiously attending the First Person Cinema series directed by Don Yannacito. But after graduation I moved into journalism and then academia, living in places without venues for such cinematic art, and I lost touch. At Ann Arbor, though, it quickly became clear that there was no need to be concerned; this festival goes out of its way to demystify the work and help the uninitiated to feel at home, starting with a giant party with complementary food and beverages donated by local businesses. I was immediately impressed with the amount of fundraising the festival is able to amass. At Colorado, my professors, especially Brakhage, instilled in me a sense that experimental film is an extremely narrow niche, with a very limited audience and appeal. Brakhage would forthrightly declare such work to be commercially “worthless,” and in his archives there are many letters in which he lamented to friends and colleagues that the only thing anyone will pay a film artist to do is to not make art. Yet here is this glorious and manifestly expensive festival dedicated to such noncommercial work, replete with scores of donors and sponsors–and in the American Midwest, no less. Every screening boasted at least two sponsors, more often three, and there were an almost ridiculous number of cash-paying awards, more than 25 in all. They even pride themselves for being able to pay all the artists whose work is shown. At the merchandise booth they were selling “Pay Artists” buttons.

Before the first screening, Michigan’s lieutenant governor and Ann Arbor’s mayor both gave brief welcoming remarks, the latter of whom disarmingly characterized the week’s offerings as an array of “totally weird, bizarre things.” That put me at ease, as did the Q&A sessions after each screening and the abundance of discussion salons offered as part of the schedule. One of the most interesting and helpful of these was the programmers panel held on the second day, where festival officials and volunteers talked about the process by which they choose what would be shown, and how they compose the multifilm screenings. To the extent that a film festival can be democratic, Ann Arbor’s is. Dozens of volunteers scattered across the world, with a broad range of interests and knowledge levels, many of them new to avant-garde cinema, take part in several online screening rounds, reviewing and whittling down thousands of submitted films (this year they had more than 2,600 films to choose from). The festival’s organizers seem particularly keen on developing the next generation of experimental film lovers and experts; a number of the festival’s programmers who put together 14 screening shorts programs from the 112 films that made the final list of official selections into the festival (there were also eight films in competition along with a dozen juror and special programs) were quite young and new to the field. One such curator who particularly impressed me was Abigail Knox, who sat on the panel and told about how her parents started taking her as a young child to the festival every year. She liked it so much that she became an intern and was then asked to put together the “Almost All Ages” program, which is geared towards families and kids. (I was also impressed and encouraged by the curator of the animation showcase’s lament that too many of the best animated films submitted this year were by straight males, which in year’s past would’ve seemed an innocuous comment, but now, in a persistent climate of attacks on all efforts to bring about and honor diversity, felt bold and refreshing.)

On Sunday, the final day, there was a salon called “What the hell was that?” in which three short films from the festival were shown, after each of which everyone asked in unison, “What the hell was that?” A mic was then passed around for folks to answer the question in their own way. It’s a favorite tradition of the festival that came about years ago when David Gatten screened a film, after which, as he was exiting the theater with the crowd, he overheard a woman ask, “What the hell was that?” He jumped in to answer, telling her that he’d made the film by taking strips of film and submerging them in sandy water on the coast of South Carolina, allowing the sand and surf to abraid the film’s surface and its soundtrack. As it turned out, the woman knew the area where he’d done this; in fact, not too long before she had scattered her mothers ashes in the same place, so she reasoned that her mother was actually part of the film. I appreciated the breadth of responses to the films in this salon, from the highly knowledgeable, with references to specific art movements and theories, to the more intuitive, like the woman for whom one film reminded her of the stray animals she fosters, and the respect with which all answers were received. 

Almost all of the festival’s screenings were held in the Michigan Theater, an ornate 1,700-seat main theater and a more intimate adjacent screening room. The theater was built in the 1920s, with copious gold moulding in the style of the era, and even an old fashioned organ that a local music professor played while festival goers were taking their seats before screenings. The luxurious and grand double staircase lobby afforded ample opportunity to talk with the filmmakers and jurors. During a break between screenings I found myself sitting in the lobby next to David Lebrun, one of the jurors. I told him I had very much enjoyed watching his program the day before, especially his 1976 film Tanka, which animated images of gods and demons from ancient Tibetan scroll paintings from the 16th to 19th centuries such that they seemed to be dancing to a jazzy, 70s prog rock jam. I asked him how he made it so the dancers seemed to spin in space, elasticizing the flat screen, and where he found the band that produced such a wild soundtrack. I was surprised to learn that he had originally approached Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead to do it. As a member of Wavy Gravy’s Hog Farm, Lebrun had a relationship with the band, but the guitarist demurred, encouraging him to instead ask Mickey Hart, one of the band’s drummers, to do it. Hart, who would later do the soundtrack for Apocalypse Now, agreed to take the project on, but couldn’t right away. In a rush to complete it in time for a festival in Los Angeles, Lebrun brought in other musicians, who, recording one instrument track at a time, improvised as the film played in the studio. After a number of tracks had been laid, the soundtrack sounded a bit too much like an Indian raga, so the jazz artist Buddy Arnold stepped in to add in layers of saxophone, electric clarinet and flute, which gave it its driving, jammy energy. 

There were too many films to even see, much less write about here, but I’ll share a few cinematic moments that have stuck with me in the weeks since the festival. One was the first film screened on opening night, Purgatorio, by Auden Lincoln-Vogel and Stephanie Miracle, which won the Peter Wilde Award for Most Technically Innovative Film. It features two modern dancers making movements and striking poses in a handball court, which forms a framed image that is then duplicated repeatedly, distorted at odd angles and affixed to itself at the edges to form a parade of impossible geometric spaces that the dancers move about in, sometimes upside down, sometimes sideways, sometimes right side up. It was the perfect mindbender to step into from the opening night party, with its liberally distributed drink tickets. Also on that first program was the world premiere of Simulacrumbs, by Joanie Wind, which is best described in the festival catalogue blurb: “a character comprised of and living in a space of eclectic nostalgia journeys to her fridge seeking pleasure, but is unable to truly experience it. Slicing through layers of fragmentary sensations and superficiality and lead by the vague feeling that something is wrong with her mind, she discovers a deeper emptiness–a hunger for coherence, originality, and authenticity. In the end, it is her own desperate need for meaning that torments her, as she herself turns out to be another fake.” It was wonderfully hilarious, weird and poignant. At a later screening, I was taken by Patient, by Lori Felker, described in the program as “fiction, reality, the private, and the performed overlap on a routine but emotional day at a medical center,” which showed young doctors, or aspiring doctors, practicing difficult patient interactions with actors playing characters with nearly debilitating physical, mental and emotional problems.  

It was often difficult to choose between short films in competition programs and the special curated programs that ran concurrently with them. Two of the latter were bright highlights for me, the first being a selection of films by Jon Behrens, who died suddenly and unexpectedly a couple of years ago. Like many in the crowd, I had never heard of him, nor seen any of his films. And judging from overheard conversations, the few who knew of him had seen at best one or two of his films. The presenters explained that he was modest and didn’t like to show off about his work, though he had over the span of his 40-year career made about 150 of all kinds – cityscape films, found footage films, hand painted, animation, and some that mixed all styles. They were all beautiful, with a great sense of filmic rhythm, and an impressive ability to subvert the flat rectangle of the screen, making images and abstract forms expand, contract, breath, spin, stretch. Also very musical, with incredibly rich soundscapes, synthesized drones that gave the films deep emotional resonance. 

Then there was a slate of shorts curated under the title of Tenacity by Karel Doing, an Oxford-based filmmaker and researcher whose most recent publication is Ruins and Resilience: The Longevity of Experimental Film. The program consisted of works spanning 30 years by Bradley Eros and Jeanne Liotta, Dominic Angerame, Jürgen Reble, Phil Solomon, Eve Heller, Louise Bourque, Vicky Smith and Doing himself, all of which present varying degrees of film graininess and show, in the words of Doing’s description, “how grain and noise take on special meanings in experimental film. Instead of being unwanted, such imperfections function as a source of creativity and expression.” The films were all lovely to behold, often deeply moving, but, for me, none so much so as Solomon’s Remains to be Seen. It moved me more deeply than any other film I’d seen over the course of the week, perhaps because I knew Solomon, knew that the film was about his mother who was dying of the same disease that would years later take his own life, but I believe it was more than that–it’s just a truly exceptional work. 

Despite the political charge of the moment, I found myself connecting more with the “totally weird, bizarre things” (thank you, Mayor Taylor) than with the more politically assertive films. I was particularly taken by the way some filmmakers were able to subvert the flat rectangle of the screen, to transform it into something more elastic and amorphous such that it seemed at times to breathe and throb and rotate in space like some spectral being. There were moments of extreme abstraction that made me catch on my own breath, from stroboscopic animations to seething oceans to uncanny biomorphic forms of dancing figures split in mirrored images. My delight in these moments was so exquisite that more than once I found myself fretting that perhaps it was all a form of escape, a distraction from the terrible collapse of the democratic norms of our republic, that instead of being wowed in a movie theater I should’ve instead been at the protest of the Tesla dealership down the street. But then again, abstraction is a kind of antithesis to authoritarianism, an act and expression of freedom; it’s not by accident that there are no abstract artists in North Korea. So I’m inclined to believe that in some abstract way Trinh T. Minh-ha was right when she declared in her keynote speech that “art could be the force of change,” even art that doesn’t forthrightly declare itself to be. I think again of Hungarian artist Péter Lichter and his meditation on a movie projector radiating from deep in the heart of an illiberal regime that’s serving as a model for the collapse of democratic norms in the US. I can’t help but imagine that he’s part of the resistance there, that as a professor and artist at one of Hungary’s oldest universities he’s also a force of change, and that his short film is a blow, however small, against the empires of greed, corruption, cruelty, bigotry and oppression, and that the fantastic spectacle of the Ann Arbor Film Festival is as well.