Patrik Söderlund’s Realms (2018), Sami van Ingen’s Flame (2018), and Maija Blåfield’s On Destruction and Preservation (2018) were selected for the international competition of the 57th Ann Arbor Film Festival. Held from March 26–31, Ann Arbor Film Festival is the oldest and longest running annual celebration of avant-garde and experimental film and video in North America.
Patrik Söderlund’s Realms will be screened on Saturday, March 30, at 15:15 in Main Theater – Michigan Theater.
A short film about geological epochs, kingdoms of life and mass extinctions, Realms voyages through deep time from the primeval ocean to the post-human future, where animate and inanimate nature are levelled to black dust. Realms premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam in January 2019.
Sami van Ingen’s Flame will be screened on Friday, March 29, at 19:15 in Main Theater – Michigan Theater.
Sami van Ingen: Flame (2018)
Flame is a fractured melodrama, based on damaged frames from the last minutes of the only remaining nitrate reel of the lost feature film Silja – Fallen Asleep When Young (1937) directed by Teuvo Tulio. All screening prints and the negative of the film were destroyed in a 1959 studio fire. A sequence from the middle of the film was found at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 2015.
Flame has won the Grand Prix at Split International Film Festival, Videorama Award for the Best Experimental Film at Timishort Film Festival, Romania, the Best Film by Audience Jury Award at Fronteira International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, Brasil, a honorary mention at Art Film Fest, Košice, Slovakia, and a diploma of merit in the national competition of Tampere Film Festival. It has been screened at several international film festivals, including Rotterdam, Edinburg, Karlovy Vary, and London BFI Film Festival.
Maija Blåfield’s On Destruction and Preservation will be screened on Sunday, March 31 at 13:15 in Main Theater – Michigan Theater..
Maija Blåfield: On Destruction and Preservation (2018)
Premiered at Visions du Réel, Nyon, On Destruction and Preservation consists of five separate documentary stories. One was filmed in arctic Svalbard on a guided tour on a rainy February day. The focus of the sightseeing changes to something not originally intended and becomes an introduction to climate change. The identifiable and endearing humanity of the characters appearing in the story make the topic easier to address. And there is also humour.
The other stories correspond and react to this setting in different ways. Stories include a discussion about saving the world, a famous Swedish eel who lived alone in a well over a century, a luggage lost in the ocean due to a wreck of a container ship and a sex scene of fungi giving birth to new life in a deteriorating house.
The 57th Ann Arbor Film Festival, March 26–31 2019, Michigan, U.S.
More information: AAFF