Out Night’s shorts program included a touching account of the father of a transsexual (The Bond by Michael T. Conner), a fun sexual exploration acted out by toy dolls (Operated by Invisible Hands by Nicole Brending), and a provocative triple-split-screen romance (Untitled Film Stills by Sam Icklow). In the Unexplored Territories program, I personally was most impressed by Danse Macabre (by Pedro Peres) and Let’s Get Married (Stephan Hillerbrand, Kirk Lynn & Mary Magsamen), two films on completely opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. Danse Macabre poetically reveals a quiet, sensuous beauty in what would otherwise be horrifying images of death, like blood rushing in water, a body twirling on a noose, and flames eating at the remains of human bones. In Let’s Get Married, a narrator proclaims absurd statements, all concluding with “peanut butter and jelly,” while three faces--blurred from the other side of a pane of glass--gobble up peanut butter and jelly sandwiches shaped like faces. Sometimes the sandwiches turn into masks with human mouths and tongues and their Wonderbread faces moved like PBJ puppets. Ridiculousness is fun.

Later I played chauffeur: I grabbed Don Hertzfeldt’s manager from the train station, and then picked up Don and his friend at the Weber Inn, and then dropped them all off at the Fleetwood Diner after sharing my nerdy enthusiasm for how great Ann Arbor is (oh, I forgot to tell them about Fleetwood's hippie hash). Back at the theatre, things were wrapping up, and eventually the die-hards headed to the aut/ BAR for some afterpartying with stiff drinks.

-Amanda