Taking the High Road: The Ann Arbor Film Festival Fights Back a Legislative Attack
It was a surprise attack at that. We first realized what was happening when a conservative state lawmaker issued a statement saying that Michigan tax dollars were going to fund “pornography” at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. The charge was surprising on a number of levels. First, we had no idea it was coming. Second, though we were receiving state support through the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs (MCACA), we didn’t fund any of the films we were showing. In fact, filmmakers pay us a submission fee to have their films considered for our competition. So, since we don’t fund films, how could state tax dollars be going into them via the AAFF? And, finally, not only do we not show pornography—the artistic value of the films we show is something we are able and eager to defend—we’d been receiving support from the MCACA for years with absolutely no problems or complaints.
Shortly after the initial volley from the state legislator, we learned how it started. A libertarian think-tank called the Mackinac Center for Public Policy had posted and circulated an essay using some aspects of our programming in an attempt to stir up politicians and the citizens of Michigan with the ultimate goal of eliminating all state funding for the arts in Michigan.
Why us? Well, we’re an easy target. Not only do we sometimes exhibit provocative, cutting-edge, and controversial films, we post our catalog with descriptions of the films we’re showing online. Simply put, we made it easy for them; the Mackinac Center representative admitted as much when testifying before a state House subcommittee.
The Mackinac Center and the state legislators who took up their cause didn’t even see the films they were complaining about. In most cases, they were going by titles and descriptions only. For example, one of the films they cited was Boobie Girl, a harmless, PG-13 animated film that tells the story of a girl who gets what she always wanted —large breasts—and lives to regret it. The short film not only played at our festival, it earned a student Academy Award, and because of its lessons regarding body image, it’s used by groups working with adolescent girls and by organizations dealing with breast cancer awareness. But, solely because of its title, it was included in the attack.
I quickly became aware that the Mackinac Center and the state legislators who jumped on their bandwagon were trying to use us as a club to beat up on the rest of Michigan’s artistic community. The films they were citing would play much differently in a House committee room at 9 a.m. than they did in a darkened theater in Ann Arbor at night.
Naturally, I was concerned about our funding and the effect this attack would have on our festival. But I was also concerned about how the fight would affect other artists and arts organizations in Michigan. As I made calls to colleagues at other nonprofits, I discovered that many of them were afraid where this campaign would go. Michigan’s budget has been problematic for years, and the arts have sustained more than their fair share of spending cuts, so many of the people I spoke with were fearful that the attack on the AAFF would serve to turn the public against the state’s entire arts community.
We also took the opportunity to turn the spotlight on three restrictions on content that the state legislature, through the MCACA, places on artists and arts organizations that receive state funding: 1) no depiction of sex acts; 2) no desecration of the flag; 3) no human waste on religious symbols. The restrictions—vague at best, unconstitutional at worst—were in place before we were attacked, but when our executive director tried to get them clarified, her attempts were fruitless.
While many of the works our attackers were using against us clearly did not violate any of these three prohibitions, this was the most problematic part for even our supporters within state government. They felt that we had tacitly agreed to these provisions as a condition of accepting state arts funding, so any work we exhibited that seemed to be in violation of these restrictions would indicate that we hadn’t lived up to our end of the bargain. That’s part of the reason we chose to respond as we did; if we inadvertently broke the rules—as vague and difficult to interpret as they were—then we were not going to raise a fight that would potentially affect the rest of the arts community, particularly during an election season.
At the same time, we knew we couldn’t maintain our artistic integrity as an international film festival if we had to adhere to them. In any case, our vote to not seek state funding for two years had rendered the language in the supplemental appropriations bill irrelevant and ultimately helped to get it removed.
Our strategy kept us from being used as a political pawn in an election year, defused the campaign against us and, more importantly, Michigan’s arts community, and garnered us a lot of support—both public and private. But the entire episode was enormously draining, distracting, and time-consuming, so we were anxious to move on with the work at hand: to build our Festival into an organization that will be strong and vital for years to come.
That was until we met with our friends at the Michigan ACLU.
In a presentation they made to our board, they explained that, as a result of the NEA controversies that moved through the courts back in the 1990s, the legal precedent had been established that when public money is given out as grants, restrictions cannot be placed on Constitutionally protected speech. Agencies can take into account the quality of an arts organization when deciding what to fund, but they can’t punish an organization by withholding funds just because it engages in controversial speech or speech that some deem to be offensive. In fact, the Michigan ACLU explained, similar content restrictions on arts grants had been overturned in three other states.
After their presentation, we realized that, while we didn’t ask for or want this fight, because we were the ones attacked, the fight was ours. We felt it was our duty as citizens to work to overturn what we now saw as unconstitutional restrictions on the freedom of speech of artists and arts organizations that receive state funding in Michigan. After waiting out the election, we—along with the ACLU of Michigan—filed suit against the state to test the constitutionality of the MCACA restrictions. While we knew from firsthand experience how ugly and distracting fights like this can be we felt it was up to us to try and get the restrictions lifted once and for all.
Yet even now, our lawsuit makes much of the arts community in Michigan nervous. Many have accepted the notion that, so long as there is public money—taxpayer dollars—going into the arts, these kinds of restrictions are necessary. Interestingly enough, that’s the very point our attackers try to turn to their advantage. They claim that since the arts are too subjective, and we need restrictions on content to protect the public’s interest, there should be no public funding of the arts; they say the arts are “too important” to be subject to restrictions on content.
But their argument pre-supposes unanimity on every other public expenditure. Do we all agree how much money should go to roads versus mass transit? Do we all agree on whether we should put more money into jails rather than social services? If there isn’t unanimity on any other issue, why should the arts be held to a higher standard?
We feel that the arts are good for communities. At the AAFF, we took the small amount of money the state gave us—$13,000 in the last year in question—and leveraged that to bring at least four times that amount into Michigan from outside the state’s borders. Moreover, every year, filmmakers and audiences converge on Ann Arbor from all over the world to take part in our Festival—many of who have never been in Michigan before. In a state that’s working to attract new tourists, we wonder why we’re not rewarded for our efforts rather than attacked.
It’s nonsensical that the arts have been targeted in the first place. In Michigan, the MCACA is part of the Department of History, Arts, and Libraries (HAL). Using simple arithmetic, we determined that the budget for the entire Department of HAL—not just the arts, but the budget for the entire department—represents just .03% of the entire state budget. That means for every $100 the state spends, three cents goes to History, Arts and Libraries. Three cents. If our attackers were on the Titanic, they’d have been bailing with teacups.
Hopefully, we’ll have a happy ending to our story. Our attorneys feel we have a good chance of success with our lawsuit, and we’re happy to report that all of the legislators who attacked us lost their seats. In fact, the political climate has turned in our favor—further demonstrating the value of patience and waiting for the right moment.
JAY NELSON serves as president of the Ann Arbor Film Festival board of directors, as a partner in Nice Work Productions, and as interim chair of the Animation and Digital Media Department at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.
