Ann Arbor Film Festival: Music Video Competition

SCREENED FILMS INCLUDE:

Dear, When I Met You
Craig Smith
Longmont, CO | 2023 | 6 | DCP
WORLD PREMIERE
Dear, When I Met You is a meditation on how art can be both ephemeral and immortal at the
same time. The film begins with a badly deteriorating 1928 musical short and reworks it into
something new by celebrating the beauty of the original film’s aging.

Born Days: How to Disappear
Louis John Morton
Milwaukee, WI | 2023 | 4 | digital file
WORLD PREMIERE
Falling rain on a window transforms into scenes of fleeting thoughts and loosely grasped
memories. This music video was inspired by long walks along Lake Michigan and dark rainy
winter nights in the Midwest of the US.

Empaths & Apples
Kelli Reilly
Los Angeles, CA | 2023 | 4 | digital file
The official music video for Empaths & Apples by River Harmony features the surreal and toxic world of Adam and Eve.

Back To Suburbia
Elliot Sheedy
Ribeira Grande, São Miguel & Azores, Portugal | 2023 | 4 | digital file
WORLD PREMIERE
Elliot Sheedy performs the song “Back To Suburbia” while advertisement memories flood into
the temples of all mesmerized viewers. The landscape of American consumerism reveals itself
for what it is: a multifaceted tool for breeding soldiers and stunting spiritual development.

Kyubabe
Ben Willis
Dearborn, MI | 2022 | 3 | digital file
Our hero, Throwaway, faces yet another challenge.

Universe Moves So Fast
Gina Kamentsky & Sarah E. Jenkins
Providence, RI and Boston, MA | 2023 | 4 | digital file
WORLD PREMIERE
Music video for the band Occurence, created by cutting up sequences from 35 and 70mm trailers and projecting them onto movable screens and walls of the studio. Our goal was to create a world that looks like 3D motion graphics without using 3D digital techniques

Universe of Language
Guangli Liu &, Bai Li
Paris, France | 2022 | 4 | digital file
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
The nearly 150-year-old custom of using body language to initiate trades among traders was
officially put to rest in 2021 with the closing of the Chicago Stock Exchange’s trading floor,
an event that became a symbol of an entire financial era. Since the dawn of civilization, the relationship between hands and numbers has been ingrained in our trading culture. Even today, many parts of China still bargain in public using the “hand in the sleeve” technique. When the idea of “Universe of Language” takes on the sense of trading gestures and draws on the discussion of dimensionality in fractal mathematics, it ends up providing a new formula of visual expression to describe how we use our body to measure and communicate the world through mathematics.

Amaranth
Justin Black
Toronto, ON, Canada | 2023 | 4 | digital file
WORLD PREMIERE
Made in collaboration with composer Gayle Young and sculptor Reinhard Reitzenstein,
Amaranth is a hybrid music and film work exploring the implications of deep ecology,
encouraging the viewer to step outside of the default anthropocentric perspective and into a
continuum of experience in which all beings have equal value.

New Water Music
Dan Rule
New Orleans, LA | 2023 | 4 | digital file
UNITED STATES PREMIERE
A cast of strange plants and flowers play, help, and devour each other over an original music
composition by Yotam Haber.

Happy Doom
Billy Roisz
Vienna, Austria | 2022 | 4 | DCP
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
Happy Doom is an audiovisual poem, an ode to color intoxication and vertigo. The screen: a vibrating membrane that simultaneously spits and swallows colors and noisy beats—a hypnotic deformed circumpolar psychedelic short trip.

Ghost Song
Joseph Keckler & M. Sharkey
Brooklyn, NY | 2022 | 6 | digital file
A narrator reveals the details of a mysterious, transformative encounter that took place in a
remote locale.

Dreams
Samantha Scafiddi
Hudson, NY | 2023 | 4 | digital file
A visual journey of tongue-in-cheek commentary and provocative storytelling about humanity’s route to self-destruction through the eyes of the moon.