Despite the UofR and the Ann Arbor Film Festival's attempts to make this event impossible to find, they will be screening Digital Program A of the 53rd Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour in Hubbell Auditorium on the UofR Campus. This program consists of:

• The Bigger Picture (Daisy Jacobs, London, UK 2014, 8 min., Digital): "'You want to put her in a home; you tell her; tell her now!' hisses one brother to the other. But Mother won't go, and their own lives unravel as she clings on. Innovative life-size animated characters tell the stark and darkly humorous tale of caring for an elderly parent. -DJ"
• Seven Signs that Mean Silence (Sara Magenheimer, Brooklyn, NY 2014, 11 min., Digital): "Two disembodied voices, Paul and Veena, wonder what things mean and what means things. Seven Signs that Mean Silence is a story about the human search for meaning in a dark void, and a story of love and friendship; between symbols and letters, words and voices, sound and image, objects and their names, poetry and speech. – SM"
• Babash (Lisa Truttmann & Behrouz Rae, USA / Austria / Iran 2014, 9 min., Digital): "Babash is a parrot. He lives in Los Angeles. Kept by an Iranian family, he speaks mostly Farsi. Sometimes Babash mixes English and Azeri into his conversations. Behrouz Rae has made friends with Babash over the years. Babash is an associative portrait about a special relationship and the domestic surroundings in which it grew. Observing Babash and Behrouz, intervening upon them with color panels, inventing a common language, a focus emerges of a shared misplacement within this genuine friendship. – LT"
• Many Thousands Gone (Ephraim Asili, Hudson, NY 2015, 8 min., 16mm on digital): "Filmed on location in Salvador, Brazil (the last city in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw slavery) and Harlem, New York (an international stronghold of the African Diaspora), Many Thousands Gone draws parallels between a summer afternoon on the streets of the two cities. A silent version of the film was given to jazz multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee to use as an interpretive score. The final film is the combination of the images and a modified version of McPhee's real time "sight reading" of the score. – EA"
• layover (Vanessa Renwick, Portland, OR 2014, 7 min., Digital): "Swirling in enchanting flight, the Vaux's Swifts layover for three weeks in Portland, Oregon each fall on their migration to South America."
• All That Is Solid (Louis Henderson, Paris, France 2014, 15 min., Digital): "A technographic study of e-recycling and neo-colonial mining filmed in the Agbogbloshie electronic waste ground in Accra and illegal gold mines of Ghana. The video constructs a mise-en-abyme as critique in order to dispel the capitalist myth of the immateriality of new technology—thus revealing the mineral weight with which the Cloud is grounded to its earthly origins. – LH"
• Special Features (James N. Kienitz Wilkins, Brooklyn, NY 2014, 12 min., Digital): "Special Features is an apparent interview with three highlights. Presented as if a fragment from an unnamed video production, an interviewee interacts with an interviewer, recounting a special experience at once unique and shared."
• Symphony No. 42 (Réka Bucsi, Budapest, Hungary 2014, 10 min., Digital): "A subjective world through 47 scenes. Small events, interlaced by associations, express the irrational coherence of our surroundings. The surreal situations are based on the interactions of humans and nature. – RB"

[source: City Newspaper events calendar, 2016-Jan-25]