I just got in from Chicago, left straight after work (I’m temporarily teaching high school kids how to make videos). So since I’m arriving on Day 3, I’ve got no dirt on the opening night gala for you, but from the looks of the food line-up (Seva, Totoro Japanese Restaurant, Avalon Bread, and more) and beer from “ABC” (local lingo for the Arbor Brewing Company), it’s on par with the film festivals I used to frequent when I lived in San Francisco (where I met my good friend and festival director Donald Harrison in fact). But of course the opening night gala is not about checking out people’s outfits and stuffing face—the film line-up….woah, geez, holy…OK, let me digress for a moment. Honestly, anyone unfamiliar with Ann Arbor, or the state of Michigan, or the entire Midwest may assume AAFF would show movies about cows and corn fields, or crappy social change docs by hippy college students, or bad features made by hopeless, small town hicks (think American Movie). Just to clarify, the Ann Arbor Film Festival is seriously classy. It’s the country’s longest running independent film festival. It’s one of few Academy-Award qualifying film festivals. And it shows some of the top independent docs, narrative, and film art in the world. Over the decades it’s shown works by Kenneth Anger, Yoko Ono, Gus Van Sant, Andy Warhol, George Lucas and Devo. Filmmakers and/or guests this year include Sam Green, Don Hertzfeldt, Craig Baldwin, Mark Hosler, Emily Hubley, Barbara Hammer, Deborah Stratman, and surely many whose names you’ll be seeing more of in the future. Anyway, regarding the opening night, I’m personally bummed about missing Team Taliban, in which a young Muslim-American exploits the worst stereotypes of this ethnicity in order to pump up his image as a professional wrestler. Stories about someone you would never encounter in your regular life make for a nice change of reality.

And isn’t that the allure of watching film: it lets you escape the stress and banalities of normal life for a moment? American cinema blossomed during the Great Depression. Don’t want to totally state the obvious, but get off the computer and come out to the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

-Amanda Scotese “Mobile Photoblographer”