I know the first question on your minds - why would I go see the 41st annual Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour over at the Detroit Institute of the Arts when I live in Ann Arbor itself, my apartment no more than a 15-minute walk from the host theater?

For the answer to that, let me refer you to the first line of the Festival's mission statement: "The Ann Arbor Film Festival is the festival for independent and experimental film." According to their Web site, more than 100 films are screened over the course of six days, competing for such endowed prizes as the Audiovisions Award for Best Sound Design, the Peter Wilde Award for the Most Technically Innovative Film, and the Screening Committee's Choice for Narrative Integrity. (Nothing along the lines of Best Actress, Best Foreign Language Film, Best Original Score, or Best Ensemble Cast.)

This ain't Cannes, Sundance, or even Saugatuck. Since 1963, this has been the venue for creations like Jamie Geiser's Ultima Thule, a ten-minute-long animated work in which "a small silver plane navigates an ultramarine storm," where "the seduction of immersion in blue is too strong to avoid, the land fills with water, and time loses its line." Ah, artsy.

One hundred films like Rebecca Meyers' Glow in the Dark (January-June), a six-and-a-half-minute trip where, per the program notes, "radiators clang while spehers and cypridina phosphoresce." Ordering tickets for next year's festival already?

Well, it turns out that's not necessary. Upon the conclusion of the A2F2, festival director Chrisstina Hamilton selects a couple dozen representative entries to tour the country. One of the earlier stops was the DIA, and the program will subsequently be travelling the rest of the year to locales such as the Capri Theater in Montgomery, Alabama (August 2), Milwaukee's Union Theater (October 14), and Albuquerque's Southwest Film Center (December 5 & 6), about 25 screenings in all.

To the uninitiated, the dominant impression is that spending full days taking in this stuff would be on the challenging side. So it sounded less risky to get a sampling at the Tour instead, to discover what sorts of films win the top awards at this sort of event, inclusion in the Tour implying a certain degree of quality. The A2F2 is to be applauded for fashioning such a greatest-hits package to parade nationwide; doing so is more likely to expose a greater number of adventurous film-lovers to this sort of avant-garde fare than would risk attending the festival itself, thereby increasing the appeal of patently unusual cinema in a country where most theaters prefer to play it safe with the usual stream of romantic comedies and murder mysteries. (Besides, if this is the sort of festival where the rules have been pretty much defenestrated, where the filmmakers aren't necessarily expecting to land multi-picture deals with a studio, one wonders just how palatable many of the daily screenings can be.)

2002 was the first Tour I experienced, and had that introduction been utterly traumatic or unexceptional, you wouldn't be seeing a piece on this year's selections. It's just over three hours of decidedly mixed genres, from short documentaries to abstract animations to more traditional storytelling techniques. The dominant memory of last year's Tour is of a lot of outright funny movies - in particular, a downright hilarious claymation short involving carnivorous sheep and dim-witted pirates - and I looked forward to an equally amusing time on a Monday evening a few weeks ago.

My first clue for how the night would go should've been clear from reading the program notes: Ted Geising's Nutria, a documentary on the Argentinian swamp rat overrunning Louisiana's marshland, and the winner of the Prix de Varti Award for Funniest Film, was being shown first. Implication: it's all less funny from there.

Apparently part of a student film project at the University of Texas-Austin, Nutria introduced me to a creature that sounds more like an atomic particle than a rodent. Maybe that's the point, as they're reproducing at such numbers that there may soon be as many of the critters as there are atoms, such that Louisiana doesn't bother to regulate the locals who hunt them - they just want them gone. They look like dog-sized hamsters, an unsettling sight at first, but upon hearing their endearing squeaks, and learning that they're both remarkably "clean" (per a DNR rep) and 100% herbivorous, they start looking kinda cute, even if they are upsetting the ecological balance. (The only thing barring them from becoming the next anthropomorphized Disney character - they "greet by urinating.") While some industrious types try to reduce their numbers by coming up with inventive nutria-meat dishes, and others take them in as household pets, most simply use the pests for target practice. This was a promising start for the evening, but as the subsequent weak attempt at humor illustrated, Mike Hoolboom's Damaged, it was all downhill. Telling a story by simply putting quirky captions on still photographs has been done before, and better, and hardly qualifies as "experimental" anymore; in this case, Damaged's gimmick plays itself out too quickly.

A few more nonfiction works dotted the program now and then, though none with as high an entertainment quotient: Michael Sandoval's The Good Son, supposedly a portrait of a young muscular Filipino-American martial-arts devotee living within a devout Christian home, fails to make anything resembling a point, and Frances Nkara's Downpour Resurfacing, a lengthy interview with a childhood physical and sexual abuse survivor, falls flat with its now-stale language of recovery and empowerment. When Downpour's elderly subject discusses "obstacles to gaining happiness," "body awareness," and repetition as the "foundation of all spiritual practices," we actually start hungering for some of the weirder stuff.

The Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker went to Percy Fuentes for his animated short Sand, which blends both sand and pixels in a beguiling black and white tale of Canadian youths making the most of ghetto life, giving giant hitchhiking slug creatures a ride, and uttering video-game-esque put-downs like "The moniker you have chosen is unappealing to me as well!" Oh, and it's all narrated in Japanese, with English subtitles, even though the film comes from Canada. Fuentes' technical innovation is to be commended, and no one will accuse him of being conventional for a second.

Jeff Sterne's animated collages in Bear Girl: Dog Boy might have had more success had the audio not been quite so muddled; the program notes stated it was a critique of unbridled consumerism, but all I could make out was truckloads of sexual innuendo. Trish VanHeusen's animated Twirl Girl was just that, a girl twirling, which somehow merited an Honorable Mention from the Jury. Berhard Schreiner's Arrêté wasn't even worthy of that distinction, but all he's really doing is adjusting the aperture on his camera as he points it out various windows. A cute technical primer, perhaps, but beyond that, it only helps reassure you that avoiding the festival itself was maybe not such a bad idea.

In another instance of questionable programming, the winner of the Gus VanSant Award for Best Experimental Film was shown next to last. According to the flyer, Deborah Stratman's half-hour-long In Order Not To Be Here is "an uncompromising look at the ways privacy, safety, convenience and surveillance determined our environment." According to my watch, though, it was past my bedtime, so we cannot report authoritatively whether we missed a comedic gem, a visual wonder, or yet another less-than-mind-blowing piece of esoterica. Would that the Tour weren't a couple hundred minutes long, or would that the organizers better realized that the Tour is a rare opportunity to expand experimental filmmaking's fan base, and that before the night drags on too long, they should dazzle us as much as possible. (Or maybe that was the intention, and In Order Not To Be Here was shunted to the rear for good reason.) This year's offerings may have been subpar, but it's nothing a little creative re-arranging couldn't have fixed. Or maybe a few more nutrias.