The veteran Ann Arbor Film Festival reaches its 50th edition (March 27-April 1) and they have set to celebrate it with an impressive programme of over 200 experimental and independent films, artist talks, round tables... Among the many highlights, the special presence of Bruce Baillie, who is the protagonist of a three-programme retrospecive, including the screening of a newly-restored copy of Quick Billy; a programme of LGBT films selected by Barbara Hammer and monographical programmes dedicated to the films of Robert Nelson, Paul Clipson, Omar Amiralay and Phil solomon. This year's jurors, Peter Rose, Michael Robinson and Kathy Geritz will also present a programme of their works (or, in the case of Geritz, a programme curated by her with films screened over the AAFF's 50 years of history). The AAFF as always will also serve as a meeting point with many filmmakers in attendance, including (apart from those rpeviously named) Craig Baldwin, Leighton Pierce, Tomonari Nishikawa, Irina Leimbacher, Scott MacDonald, Mark Toscano and many others.

The AAFF also recently published the fourth volume in its annual compilation series with a selection of films from its 49th edition, available at their store.

Click on the link to see the AAFF's extensive full programme.

ATA: Jennifer Reeves’ When It Was Blue
Friday, March 16, 2012, 19:30h
Artists' Television Access, 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94110

SF Cinematheque presents: Jennifer Reeves In Person

“Drawing as much from the feminist surrealism of Peggy Ahwesh, the interior psychological exploration of Stan Brakhage, and the globalized interiority of Warren Sonbert as from the Vertovian heritage, Jennifer Reeves turns the screen into a materialist writing-pad that moves at the speed of private thought.” (Michael Sicinsky)

Presented by Cinematheque as a work-in-progress in 2008, Jennifer Reeves’ now-completed When It Was Blue is a work of incredible ambition and scope. Described by Chris Stults as “an overwhelmingly powerful achievement on a truly epic scale,” the dual-projected, feature-length, 16mm work is a dazzling, deliriously immersive and visceral sound/image experience. Shot over thre years in Iceland, New Zealand, Costa Rica and North America, in documentation of our fragile natural world, the film—fiercely overpainted, spectacularly edited— explodes with color and an overpowering sense of nowness, a rushed sense of urgency. In its attempt at maximal expression and globalizing vision, in its fusion of simultaneously micro- and macroscopic views of nature with a blurred sense of subjective visuality and interiority, When It Was Blue is a filmic achievement on par with the most ambitious works of Stan Brakhage, Jack Chambers and Michele Smith, an ecstatic work of complex visual philosophy which aspires (tragically) to nothing less than the reconciliation of objective and subjective realities. Other short works by Reeves will screen. (Steve Polta)