Odds & Ends Film Festival attracts Hollywood filmmakers to Charlottesville this weekend
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As satisfying as it can be to settle in with some hot popcorn to watch the latest blockbuster or long-awaited tearjerker, sometimes a small picture with big ideas is the one that captures your heart and imagination. This weekend, Light House Studio's third annual Odds & Ends Film Festival will fill Charlottesville's Vinegar Hill Theatre with moments of experimentation, exploration, and sheer fun.
One of the longest of the short films to be screened during the festival, which takes place Friday and Saturday, is a 15-minute journey into the mesmerizing process of making glass. Some of the shortest ones were created by local high school students in Light House Studio's "Scratch, Paint, Film" workshop who painstakingly transformed 16-millimeter film not by shooting scenes with it, but by altering the film itself, using scratches and painted elements to tell brief but captivating stories.
"It's little glimpses of how life is made," Rachel Lane, one of the festival's three organizers, told The Daily Progress. "A lot of these films aren't distributed on a wider level. They're opening outside commercial structures and often [are] self-funded. Usually, you have to travel to a film festival in a big city to see them."
Lane, the program director at Light House Studio and an experimental filmmaker herself, is teaming up again with fellow festival co-founders with Anna Hogg, who teaches digital art and filmmaking at the University of Virginia, and Jason Robinson, who teaches digital art and filmmaking at the University of Mary Washington.
Nineteen short films, selected from an international pool of more than 150 submissions, will be screened Friday and Saturday, with question-and-answer time to follow.
New this year will be two guest filmmakers arriving from Los Angeles.
On Friday, Melissa Ferrari, an experimental animator who's also an educator, nonfiction filmmaker and magic lantern expert, will present "Relief: A Phantasmagoria." Ferrari's 2023 experimental documentary will be presented using antique magic lanterns and hand-drawn animation images.
Writer and director Courtney Stephens will lead Saturday's "Nonfiction and Fantasy" talk and workshop, which dives into the interesting intersections between nonfiction filmmaking and the often fantastical moments that more frequently are becoming part of modern reality.
Before the festival begins, Ferrari and Stephens plan to visit UVa on Thursday. Ferrari will teach a slide-making workshop, while Stephens will screen "The American Sector," her film about the pieces of the former Berlin Wall scattered across the United States, including one at UVa.
Lane said that the "Scratch, Paint, Film" creations were so compelling that all 11 class projects have been included on the festival. Painstaking "camera-less filmmaking" work went into crafting the film segments and looping them, which yields an animation effect that's "full of color and life and texture," Lane said. Audience members can see them at the beginning of Friday's and Saturday's screenings.
There's an ephemeral quality to a festival that gives audience members a rare chance to see short films, but Lane said the sense of community building it brings is substantial. The opportunity to learn about someone else's life experiences, artistic vision and dreams provides space for conversation, understanding and finding common ground that'll last long after the house lights go up.
"Creativity really opens people up," Lane said. "It's such a celebration."