As the megaplex superstars gear up for the self-congratulatory awards season, the experimental short offerings of the 48th Annual Ann Arbor Film Festival offer a refreshing intermezzo for movie geeks. The AAFF, which has been traveling around the country since 1964, brings nine 16mm shorts to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Some are realistic, others abstract and all gloriously different. Some employ experimental animation, such as Gregory Godhards Collide-a-Scope, which imagines the otherworldly, lava lamp-like internal goings-on of the Large Hadron Collider, and Steve Cossmans TUSSLE-MUS-CLE, which uses recycled, hand-spliced film in 7,000 single frames to explore mans relationship with the environment. Others observe the world as it is, such as Piensa en Mi, by Alexandra Cuesta, which captures Los Angeles through the windows of a moving bus. Forget what you know about movies and trek to the frontiers of filmmaking at 7 p.m. 1001 Bissonnet. For information, call 713-639-7300 or visit www.mfah.org.$7.
Sat., Jan. 15, 7 p.m., 2011