About 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival

The opening night reception take place on Tuesday, March 21, 2017 at 6:30 p.m. at the Michigan Theater Grand Foyer. The festival will begin with cocktails, an open bar, hors d'oeuvres, food from local vendors, desserts, and art installations. Entrance includes seats to the first screening of the festival, the Opening Night Films in Competition 1. Music provided by DJ Jeremy Wheeler. The first screening of the Festival, Films in Competition 1 is made up of nine short films including recent experimental, documentary, and animated works.

Page of Madness was directed in 1926 by Kinugasa Teinosuke and was lost for nearly half-a-century. The story centers on a janitor at the insane asylum that holds his wife. Renowned Japanese benshi Kataoka Ichiro narrates the film and Detroit area trio Little Bang Theory (Frank Pahl, Terri Sarris, and Doug Shimmin), will perform an original score written by Frank Pahl on toy and hand-made instruments.

The Animation program features ten recent animated films, featuring an artificial intelligence with the affective capacities of a kitten, a suburban woman who can't stop growing fingers, a mother's alcohol addiction, and more.

The films in the competition feature twelve family-friendly narrative, documentary, experimental, and animated films. Features include a young stag who seeks to improvise sweet music, organic forms that shift and undulate, the evolutionary life of an organism, a girl seeking her identity in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, and more.