German filmmaker Ute Aurand has been making personal, poetic films for over thirty years. Many of her films are diaristic, focused on the sensuous details of daily life, whether inside the home or out in the garden. The gesture of brushing another's hair, a glance between two women, and the dance of light across a leaf are equally mesmerizing, in part due to the care of Aurand's own looking. The three films collected in tonight's program are infused with an awareness of mortality; all pay homage to family, friends, and mentors. In The Butterfly in Winter, Aurand collaborates with filmmaker Maria Lang to delicately depict Lang's daily intimate rituals with her elderly mother. Lang reads from diaries that she began in 1991 after moving to the countryside to take on this caretaking. Aurand considers Half-Moon for Margaret, some of which is edited in camera, to be in dialogue with the work of the self-taught British filmmaker Margaret Tait. Aurand's most recent film, the exquisite Hanging upside down in the Branches, pays loving tribute to her parents, whom she filmed prior to their deaths in 2000 and 2007.