Is virtuality a virtual certainty to dominate audience entertainment screens as this infant century grows older?

Probably.

That likelihood makes it crucial that the Ann Arbor Film Festival - which wrapped up its 39th year Sunday evening - continue to provide patrons a generous look at things to come.

Digital technology-produced films dominated the Michigan Theater Screening Room throughout the festival and provided a providing a sizeable dose of the seemingly limitless worlds one can create by mating an artist's imagination with multi-talented microchips.

This prospect of limitless possibilities also makes it crucial that the festival hold true to its love and advocacy of film as a universal art form. While the futuristic wonders displayed at the Michigan can achieve things undreamed of by traditional moviemakers, nothing - repeat, nothing - in the high-tech new wave looks exactly like film, particularly in terms of emotional depth. Planet Celluloid may be limited, but it remains enthralling and unique.

That fact was reflected in many of some three-dozen film works honored with money citations by the Festival's three-juror panel.

Some of the choices must have been wrenching, or at least I hope they were. Take Jim Trainor's "The Moschops" (Best Animation Award), a cartoon documentary of semi-prehistoric animals with dinosaurs' bodies and human-sized skulls.

These crazy critters would do "The Far Side: comic strip crator Gary Larson proud. But Trainor's true stroke of genius is to insert (offscreen) talking-head narration by the animals themselves, as we watch them eat, excrete, make love (including the missionary position), fight, give birth, and also wither and die. Trainor's 13-minute tragi-comic epic grandly encompasses the seven (?) ages of pre-man, capping it with what could be deemed a pro-life plea: "Nothing on earth has a right to live, only a chance."

I don't know how the judges could have chosen between "The Moschops" and "Stanley," a claymation work by England's Suzie Templeton about a working-class-London marriage so horrid that the beaten-down hubby comes to love the giant cabbage plant growing in his back yard more than he loves his carnivorous, meat-chopping sadist of a wife. "Stanley" did pick up an award for Best Lighting Design, but deserved more.

Another winner - and loser - was "The Confession," a funny and moving narrative by Los Angeles's Carl Pfirman about a pair of aging male lovers, one of whom is dying and is thus seized by his long-dormant Catholic roots. He wants to confess to a priest, and the cleric's subsequent intervention serves to drive a religious-emotional wedge into a decades-long relationship.

A thoughtful and beautifully-acted meditation on love, morality and forgiveness, "The Confession" captured the Liberty St. Video Award for Best Gay/Lesbian Film. Unfathomably, it was beaten out for Best Narrative Film by Hollie Lavenstein's too-arch, too-arcane "Cleave." A 15-minute portrait of a man who claims custody over a dog amidst the fallout of a busted marriage, this perplexing film focuses on the fluctuating relationship between the man (who never speaks) and the dog (who at least whimpers), while the sound vacuum is filled with phone messages left mostly by the man's wife.

Had Lavenstein provided adequate sound to make these garbled missives at least minimally audible, perhaps "Cleave" would have been comprehensible and even dramatically fulfilling. As it stands, it's an enigma scarcely worth pursuing (though the dog is a first-rate actor).

Speaking of actors, Ann Arbor's Scott Hoye delivered a virtuoso display of dementia and death in Anthony Penta's locally-made "The Hapless Antiquarian," winner of the Best Michigan Filmmaker prize.

Styled in the mode of a silent movie, the film runs straight through the alphabet as applied to Hoye's mad antiquarian, who for all his efforts can't rid himself of a cursed book that ultimately proves his undoing. Graceful and wildly imaginative, this 6 1/2-minute beaut probably deserved more than it got.

Other notables: Dean Kapsalis's "Jigsaw Venus" (Isabella Liddell Award), another short-narrative silent gem about an overly plump single lass who's given up on life, and whiles away her evenings piecing together a jigsaw puzzle of Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" - obviously wishing she looked like the goddess in the painting. Kapsalis's simple message in this simple but irresistible, lavish-colored love story: Never, ever give up. The puzzle will fit.

Then there was Lyn Elliot's "Once," a fable about a young woman who makes a deal with herself that she can let loose with assorted socially inappropriate and even violent behavior one time in her life - but when? Watch the tension mounts as Elliot's protagonist ponders avenging the daily aggravations with which we all, alas, identify. Pow! Zap!