The 51st Ann Arbor Film Festival features more than 250 films, videos and live performances, including premieres of 30 new works from international artists. The festival runs Tuesday through Sunday. Filmmakers and special guests include Ken Burns, Pat O’Neill, Suzan Pitt, Ernst Karel, Laida Lertxundi, Kevin Jerome Everson and Marcin Gizycki.

For a schedule of showings and events, please visit ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL.

The Ann Arbor Film Festival is the longest-running independent and experimental film festival in North America, established in 1963. Internationally recognized as a premiere forum for independent filmmakers and artists, each year’s festival engages audiences with remarkable cinematic experiences. The six-day festival presents 40 programs with more than 180 films from over 20 countries of all lengths and genres, including experimental, animation, documentary, fiction, and performance-based works.

For its first four decades, the festival solely exhibited works finished on 16mm. The AAFF remains committed to the exhibition of this medium among other formats including expanded cinematic forms.

Thousands of influential filmmakers and artists have exhibited early work at the AAFF, including Kenneth Anger, Agnes Varda, Andy Warhol, Gus Van Sant, Barbara Hammer, George Lucas, Les Blank, Matthew Buckingham, and James Benning.

In addition to exhibiting over one hundred new films in juried programs each year, the AAFF presents filmmaker retrospectives, gallery installations, panel discussions, historic and thematic surveys and contemporary artist programs.

Recent retrospectives have featured the films of Bruce Baillie, Chick Strand, Omar Amiralay, Bruce Conner, Pavel Medvedev, Matthias Müller and Toshio Matusmoto.

Artists recently presenting programs of their works at the AAFF have included Telcosystems, Duke & Battersby, Phil Solomon, Naomi Uman, Nicky Hamlyn and Wang Bing.

The Ann Arbor Film Festival receives more than 2,500 submissions annually from more than 65 countries and serves as one of a handful of Academy Award®-qualifying festivals in the United States. Our awards program presents more than $20,000 in cash and film stock/services to filmmakers.