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Destination Ann Arbor
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Decriminalize Nature Ann Arbor
Recent experimental, animated, personal, and documentary films that include an intimate dreamworld; the rising heat; a surreal game world; inner and outer lives; home and family, relationships, desires, wishes, and everything; phony operatic palaces; a quest through a parallel universe; a path to the other world; a psychedelic found footage slideshow; a common life in a virtual universe; and the pre-Hispanic myth of the Sixth Sun.
O, Luna!
Virginia Lee Montgomery
Austin, TX | 2021 | 6 | 4K Video
O, Luna! is a surreal, live-action dreamscape of ocular symbols, echoing sounds, and swirling logic. Featuring a cast of live luna moths and a moth-scale DSLR camera, the film investigates philosophical themes of metamorphosis and image making. O, Luna! was created, crafted, filmed, edited, produced, and scored by Virginia Lee Montgomery while she was cocooned inside her home with her moths over the global pandemic.
Sauna
Anna Lena Spring & Lara Perren
Lucerne, Switzerland | 2021 | 4 | HD Video
Ava enters the Sauna for the first time. She is overwhelmed by the nudity, her thoughts, and the physical sensations. The other guests go about their routines. With the rising heat Ava starts to relax. Finally, she melts away and dissolves into complete ecstasy.
Moving or Being Moved
Sabine Gruffat
Chapel Hill, NC | 2020 | 11 | HD Video
Postmodern dance theory by Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer is put to work while a woman cleans the house in a motion capture suit. The everyday performance of domestic labor is teleported into a surreal game world where an emotionally responsive AI chatbot provides no answers.
True Sound Façade
Laura N-Tamara
London, UK | 2020 | 3 | HD Video
Commissioned by Barbican x The Smalls for their Inside Out short film series, True Sound Façade is a poetic dance and animation film in which a dancer realizes that their digital self feels truer than their real-world self. The film takes its inspiration from the Japanese notions of “honne,” the true sound, one’s innermost feelings, and “tatemae,” the façade we put up to live in society.
The Fourth Wall
Mahboobeh Kalaee
Qom, Iran | 2021 | 10 | HD Video
Home and family, relationships, desires, wishes, and everything are summarized in a kitchen. The stuttering boy is alone there, playing with his imagination.
L’opéra d’or
Matthieu Dumont & Geneviève Crépeau
Rouyn-Noranda, Canada | 2020 | 11 | HD Video
In a music-punctuated story set in the near future, the Pizza Delivery Guy and his wife Late Catharsis are passionately in love.
Punctured Sky
Jon Rafman
Montréal, Canada / Los Angeles, USA | 2021 | 21 | 4K Video
After reuniting with an old friend, an unseen narrator embarks on a quest to uncover the truth behind the mysterious disappearance of his beloved childhood video game, Punctured Sky. Along the way, he must contend with a series of strange encounters on and offline and confront the precariousness of memory, truth, and selfhood in the internet epoch.
LES-1
Micha Vanony
Monte Carlo, Monaco | 2021 | 5 | HD Video
HAH’s music video: a witch discovers a path to the other world—dreamt using neural style transfer, optical flow, and deep dreams.
Codex Entropia: 3D
Richard Pell
Pittsburgh, PA | 2021 | 9 | HD Video
An ancient civilization develops complex computing technologies using only well-trained animals. Told through a psychedelic found-footage slideshow sourced entirely from 100-year-old stereoscopic photographs. Seen here in its intended anaglyph format. Requires red/cyan 3D glasses.
I Gotta Look Good for the Apocalypse
Ayce Kartal
Paris, France | 2021 | 6 | HD Video
March 2020. After China, the whole planet locks itself in. Our world, which we call “real,” is drained of what used to be its substance, and forms of digital life multiply, like these couples whose avatars share a common life in a virtual universe. But what if the crisis we are actually experiencing is not a pandemic, but an accelerated derealization of our lives?
The Analog Ocean
Luis Macias
Mexico/Spain | 2022 | 10 | 35mm
“The ocean is the only crossing to arrive to Mount Analogue. Through each wave, which breaks into each of the primary colors, a gateway opens to a new perception ... that of an ocean as deep, dark, and as difficult to access as the climb to the highest mountain. To the top where the sixth sun can be perceived.” Inspired by the pre-Hispanic myth of the Sixth Sun and Mount Analogue.