This May the Columbus Film Council presents some of the best adult animations from the CIF+VF. This screening is free.

Watch great animated films, drink mead, and eat great Japanese food from Tokyo GoGo with us Wednesday night. We've combed through the archives to bring you some of the best animations for grownups that have screened at the CIF+VF over the last few years. And they are great! Here's a partial listing of the great cartoons we will screen on May 1st:

Sebastian's Voodoo, 4:07, by Joaquin Baldwin
A voodoo doll must find the courage to save his friends from being pinned to death. Created at the UCLA Animation Workshop, with music by Nick Fevola.

Elephants 2008, 12:00, by Sally Pearce
In a totally grey world, a little girl's life is turned upside down by an infestation of elephants.
“….a stunning piece of work from the NFTS and I’m sure a team to watch out for in the future. It was a very ambitious film which combined animation and live action in a sophisticated way. The NFTS has always been regarded as the top of the ladder for students, and this film did justice to it’s reputation.”
Review, British Society of Cinematographers.http://www.bscine.com/

The Birds Upstairs, 9:00, by Christopher Jarvis
Frustrated attempts to bear children overwhelm the lives of an aristocratic, avian couple in the early nineteenth century.

Escape of the Gingerbread Man!!!, 11:00, by Tod Polson
A young storyteller challenges the old master in a pub on the Irish west coast. When things take an unexpected turn. Brought to life by veteran Irish comedian Jon Kenny, with original music by traditional Irish band 'Rattle the boards'. 'Escape of the Gingerbread Man' is a mad romp through the Irish countryside, and a subtle commentary on the changes in traditions, and culture that is happening through the emerald Isle.

See you there!

The Columbus Film Council, sponsor of the Columbus International Film + Video Festival, is pleased to present, “Film Festival 101: Understanding the Jury Process” on April 30, 2013 at 7pm. This free community workshop will be held at the Columbus Library Main Branch, 96 S. Grant Avenue, in the Main Auditorium.

This interactive presentation will feature an overview of the role film festivals play in the development and distribution of studio and independent films lead by a panel of past and present jurors and jury chairs.

This public event is intended for film-going audiences, prospective jurors, local filmmakers or anyone passionate about the art and science of film.

Want to be a juror? Want to enter a film into competition? Already a juror? Then this is the event for you.

The Columbus Film Council presents:

Two films about Hugo Chavez and Venezuela:
The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, 24 minutes, Greg Palast
Venezuela Rising, 65 minutes, Jennifer Wager

Tuesday, April 23, 2013
7:30pm
Arena Grand Movie Theatre
175 W Nationwide Blvd
Columbus, OH 43215
Co sponsored by The Free Press
This screening is free.

The Columbus Film Council is pleased to present the Columbus premier of
The Assassination of Hugo Chavez. Over the years many things have been said about Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez but rarely has the true story of the man Pat Robertson called "a dangerous enemy" been told - that's what Greg Palast has done in his documentary short film The Assassination of Hugo Chavez.
Greg Palast is a New York Times bestselling author[ and a freelance journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation as well as the British newspaper The Observer.

As seen through the eyes of grandmother and community organizer Gladys Bolivar, Venezuela Rising follows Gladys and her compatriots in 2004, five days before it is to be decided by popular referendum whether Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez will continue in office or step down. The entire nation has been mobilized – will it be SI – yes he will be recalled, or NO – he will remain in office. Most in Venezuela feel that no less than the entire future of their country is at stake.

Issues of democracy and politics are addressed — what constitutes a free and fair election — and is that enough to ensure citizen participation? How are elections the ultimate measure of a thriving democracy? Venezuela Rising gets behind the headlines and into the neighborhoods of Caracas to find out how participatory democracy works on the ground.

Parking
The attached Marconi Parking Garage has ample parking for meetings and events. The covered parking garage and walkway are well lit, secured and handicapped accessible to the Arena Grand's facilities. And with a reduced garage rate, everyone can save. Parking starts at just $1 per car, up to 4 hours.

This month the Columbus Film Council presents Matt Swift and volume 22 of the Journal of Short Film. This screening is free.

1. An Eyeful of Sound – Samantha Moore (2010; 10:25)
I don't know if you've ever heard a goat eating carrots? It's almost too much, it's so lovely' An Eyeful of Sound conjures up the fascinating visually complex internal world of audio-visual synaesthesia, where senses make unique connections the rest of us don't experience. Synaesthesia is discussed, argued over, dissected and celebrated in this beautifully sensitive multi award-winning animated documentary.

2. Metamorphosis – Christin Bolewski (2007; 5:32)
‘Growth gets confronted with destruction, aesthetic beauty with rotten ugliness.’ Using the possibilities of modern video processing and animation techniques the motif of a traditional still life gets fragmented. Different parts of the image are arranged running simultaneously forward or backward, in fast motion or being looped – the still life starts to “breathe”.

3. Breathing Lessons – Claudia Esslinger (2006; 10:00)
- Breathing Lessons poetically traces a longing for oxygen through the artist’s family history. It draws a thread through a series of life experiences that relied on the restorative powers of respiration, both physically and emotionally. Set in an indeterminate time past, it is lyrical and rhythmic, humorous and tragic, piercing and elegiac.

4. A Covenant Adam – Ariana Hamidi (2005; 15:00)
Lines will be crossed in family history and myth. A Covenant Adam navigates memories of a childhood filled with violence and fear through optically printed Super 8mm home movies, Incredible Hulk comic strips, interviews with children, and fragmented texts that float across the screen.

5. A Moment’s Reverie – Tess Martin (2007; 10:20)
Letters in a book come alive on the page and trigger an imaginative journey. Thoughts and memories are created frame by frame using back-lit tissue paper cut-outs. Tess Martin is an animator currently based in Seattle and is a founding member of SEAT, Seattle Experimental Animation Team. For more information visit www.filmandscissors.com

6. The Maid (Il Shaghala) – Heidi Saman (2008; 19:08)
Rasha is an Egyptian housemaid who is not so skilled at her job. When Rasha’s suspicions of her employers are confirmed, she must come to terms with her perceptions of trust, duty and her place within the family household.

7. 10 short documentaries about my childhood home – Dorothea Braemer (2009; 10:00)
Recounts how the filmmaker and her sisters struggle to reach common ground while dealing with the sale of the family house and their mother’s move to an assisted living situation. Mixing observational footage, personal reflection, Brechtian re-enactments with masks, and family photos, 10 short documentaries... is an intimate exploration of familial relationships, childhood and the passage of time.

8. STRIP – Erika Suderburg & Linda Besemer (2007; 7:13)
A playful rave trance glitch riff on experimental animation fabricated without animation. STRIP utilizes painting trimmings and mobilizes them in a skewed homage to the fanciful worlds of early Hans Richter, Oscar Fischinger and Musique Concrete, and 60's Color Field Painting. The static is sent packing in a frenzy of temporal excess and repetition accompanied by the sounds of its own launch.

Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal
(120 minutes) Written, Directed, and Edited by Stephen Vittoria
Co sponsored by The Free Press and BLACK CENTRAL

“Long Distance Revolutionary” focuses on Mumia Abu Jamal’s career as a prolific writer and journalist from the depths of prison. The film chronicles his life and work as a journalist, writer, and philosopher –a public intellectual who has spent thirty years in a Pennsylvania prison, twenty nine of them in solitary confinement on death row. The film tracks Mumia’s early work in journalism as a writer for the Black Panther newspaper (at age 15) through his promising and emerging career as a reporter for National Public Radio. After Mumia is convicted for the murder of Philadelphia patrolman Daniel Faulkner, the story then exposes Mumia’s battles with the American judicial system(prisons & courts) to continue his journalism and radio broadcasts from behind bars– a battle he continues to wage to this very day. The film evolves into an exploration of his impact on social and political discourse both in the United States and around the world.

The film features exclusive and rare prison interviews with Mumia as well insights from Cornel West, Alice Walker, Angela Davis, Ruby Dee, Rubin Hurricane Carter, Amy Goodman, Dick Gregory, Peter Coyote, Giancarlo Esposito, Tariq Ali, Michael Parenti, Ramsey Clark, M1 (Dead Prez), Dave Zirin, Aya de Leon, Frances Goldin, Ramona Africa, as well as many others. Ultimately, the film ushers the audience behind prison walls and exposes the horrors of the American gulag. The audience experiences this journey with Mumia... a journey that defines the triumph of hope, courage, and love.

This screening is free.

The Columbus Film Council presents:
Shorts At Brothers Drake Series #8- What is American?
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
8:00pm
Brothers Drake Meadery (map)
26 E. 5th Ave
Columbus, Ohio, USA

The Columbus Film Council’s Near Monthly Screening Series (NMSS) is back at Brothers Drake with more award winning short films:

Another chapter from The Stagecoach Bar: An American Crossroads- an excerpt from Jennifer Tennican's CIF+VF Bronze Plaque winning film about the Stagecoach Bar in Wilson, Wyoming.

CIF+VF Honorable Mention award winner CLAY. CLAY is filmmaker Sushma Khadepaun-Parmara’s meditation on the understanding of life and death, the form and the formless. The film follows a young woman's journey through loss and letting go, juxtaposed with mythological images of Lord Ganesha, symbolizing detachment. Sushma Khadepaun-Parmara was born in India and now lives in Austin, Texas.

Citizen Zero (2012, 18 minutes) by Alexandra Stergiou is about the filmmaker’s father, his politics, and the seventh-eight year long journey he has taken to become a U.S. citizen.

“We love screening works at Brothers Drake Meadery. It’s a great casual atmosphere with a really great screening area and a high quality sound system. The NMSS allows us to show the really great films that we didn’t have enough screen time to show during the main week of the Columbus International Film + Video Festival (CIF+VF) in November. The CIF+VF is the longest running film festival in the United States.”, said Susan Halpern, CFC Executive Director.

Admission is free.

The Columbus Film Council’s Near Monthly Screening Series (NMSS) is an erratic set of screenings year round, sometimes monthly, weekly, or more. It’s when the CFC has a great film or set of films and an appropriate venue to screen them. Usually free or at very low cost, the CFC is committed, through its NMSS, to showing underserved and underrepresented media works. Films you can’t see anywhere else.

The Columbus Film Council’s Near Monthly Screening Series (NMSS) 4th Tuesday Free Press Film Night moves this month to the Arena Grand Movie Theater. Cosponsored by the Free Press, the 4th Tuesday Films are documentary films that represent the underserved and underrepresented.

Money & Medicine is a Columbus International Film + Video Festival 2012 Chris Award winner, Mental + Physical Health Division.

With remarkable candor and poignancy, Money & Medicine captures the painful end-of-life treatment choices made by patients and their families, ranging from very aggressive interventions in the ICU to palliative care at home. The film also investigates the controversy surrounding diagnostic testing and screening as well as the shocking treatment variations among patients receiving a variety of elective procedures. Just as the national debate over health care cost containment and deficit reduction heats up, these intimate patient portraits put a human face on the crisis facing American medicine.
Admission is free.

Directions & Parking

The attached Marconi Parking Garage has ample parking for meetings and events. The covered parking garage and walkway are well lit, secured and handicapped accessible to the Arena Grand's facilities. And with a reduced garage rate, everyone can save. Parking starts at just $1 per car, up to 4 hours. Bring your parking stub into the theater for validation.

Give Me The Banjo
Directed by Marc Fields
NR; 90 minutes; 2011

Columbus International Film + Video Festival: 2012 Silver Chris Award, Art Division

A comprehensive look at a quintessential American musical instrument, the banjo, from its African roots to contemporary jazz and into the 21st century.

Narrated by Steve Martin, Give Me the Banjo brings together contemporary players—including Pete Seeger, Earl Scruggs, Bela Fleck, Mike Seeger, Don Vappie, Abigail Washburn and The Carolina Chocolate Drops—with folklorists, historians, instrument makers and passionate amateurs to tell the story of America’s instrument in all its richness and diversity.

The Banjo Project is a cross-media cultural odyssey: a major television documentary, a live stage/multi-media performance, and a website that chronicle the journey of America’s quintessential instrument—the banjo—from its African roots to the 21st century. It’s a collaboration between Emmy-winning writer-producer Marc Fields and banjo virtuoso Tony Trischka (the Project’s Music Director), one of the most acclaimed acoustic musicians of his generation.

The Banjo Project website — www.thebanjoproject.org

Admission is $3.

We're back at Brothers Drake with more award winning short films:

The Stagecoach Bar: An American Crossroads- an excerpt from Jennifer Tennican's CIFVF Bronze Plaque winning film about the Stagecoach Bar in Wilson, Wyoming.

Silver Chris award winner SHACHARIT – A MORNING PRAYER. In Steven Loring's short film set int an Old World, ultra-orthodox synagogue in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, we intimately observe the daily sunrise prayer service - and hear the story of one congregant, an Hasidic rabbi, who traces his journey to this segregated life back to a McDonald's in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Silver Chris Award winner Crooked Beauty is a poetic documentary that chronicles artist-activist Jacks McNamara's transformative journey from childhood abuse to psych ward inpatient to pioneering mental health advocacy. It is an intimate portrait of her intense personal quest to live with courage and dignity, and a powerful critique of standard psychiatric treatments. Poignant testimonials connect the fissures and fault lines of human nature to the unstable topography and mercurial weather patterns of the San Francisco Bay Area. Crooked Beauty reshapes mental health stigmas through a new healing culture and political model for living with madness as a tool of creativity, inspiration and hope.

http://www.crookedbeauty.com/


Free.

The Columbus Film Council presents:

The 60th Columbus International Film + Video Festival’s
Saturday Morning Cartoons From Around The World at First Night

First Night of Film

A Tooth Tale 6:17 Ron Fleischer
Flawless Life 4:00 ÖZGÜL GÜRBÜZ
Ladies Knight 10:00 Joe Rothenberg
Finding My Magic- Children’s Rights Series 5:00 Eve Ash
China Fantasia 8:00 Joe Chang
My Home 20:00 Calvert Waller III

A Tooth Tale
This traditionally animated short tells the story of Tommy Malloy, a 6-year old boy who loses his first tooth. When he learns that the Tooth Fairy will give him money for it he hatches a plot to trap and shake her down for all her loot. The rhyming dialog and art direction pay homage to the cartoons of the 1950's and 1960's.

Flawless Life
One day a homeless man finds something and it changes his life . . .

Ladies Knight
Sir Knightly wants to kiss the Princess, but she thinks he's a dweeb. When a fire-breathing Dragon arrives, the Princess finds him way 'hotter' than Sir Knightly, so she rides off with the Dragon to his castle. Against the advice of the Singing Sword, Sir Knightly sets off to rescue the Princess with the help of his trusty steed, Doofus. Ladies Knight is a fairy-tale musical featuring five original musical numbers, including the show-stopper 'She's Not Into You.'

Finding My Magic
Finding My Magic is an award-winning educational resource created to assist young children (aged 4 to 11 years) to build confidence and communication skills, and to develop an awareness of their rights and responsibilities. Inspired by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and Save the Children Australia. Finding My Magic was created by psychologist, Eve Ash and features Australian Olympic champion, Cathy Freeman OAM.

China Fantasia
An animation from China based on traditional Chinese instruments and music.

My Home
My Home is the story of a persistent and self-indulgent beaver who is not a very good neighbor. That is, until he meets a precocious no-nonsense turtle.
In Oneida society, the oral tradition is very important and represents the soul of the Oneida people. From generation to generation children are taught about their Oneida traditional beliefs from an Elder who has the ability to speak with meaning and confidence.