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Thomas Edison Film Festival

Kutz Theatre | 715 Grand Ave.

Apr. 6, 2022 @ 6:30PM

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Event is sponsored by the Warren County Cultural and Heritage Division of Land Preservation

Seating is LIMITED.  Advance reservations encouraged.  Call the Centenary Stage Company Box office to reserve.

(908) 979 - 0900

A selection of international and national short films including animation, experimental, documentary, narrative, and screen dance.

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About the TEFF:

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Since 1981, the mission of the Thomas Edison Film Festival (TEFF) has been to promote innovation in the art of the moving image, and films that are the centerpiece of the festival honor Edison's vision.

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Edison's films did for the eye what his phonograph did for the ear.  He made 75, twenty-second-long films in his West Orange studio.  His earliest films presented magic shows, plays, vaudeville shows with dancers and strongmen, cowboys, and boxing matches.

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The festival's relationship to Thomas Edison's invention of the motion picture camera and the kinetoscope and his experimentation with the short film is an essential part of our mission.  Shorts are the essence of the festival - not a sidebar to feature films.  TEEF is a socially conscious, modern, fiercely independent traveling showcase for shorts, reaching out to diverse audiences with provocative, timely, edgy and compelling new works by both accomplished and emerging filmmakers.

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The Thomas Edison Film Festival welcomes all genres including narrative, experimental, animation, documentary, screen dance and hybrids.  We celebrate films which address the environment, race and class, immigration, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities and issues of social justice.  The films we celebrate are artistic, empathetic and engaging works which simultaneously teach and entertain.

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To learn more about the Thomas Edison Film Festival and the Thomas A. Edison Media Arts Consortium visit www.TEFilmFest.org

Jane Steuerwald, Executive Director: 

201-856-6565 | Jane@TEFilmFestival.org

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The Consortium is grateful for generous funding and support:

New Jersey State Council on the Arts

Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University

The Charles Edison Fund – Edison Innovation Foundation

The Hudson County Office of Cultural and Heritage Affairs and Tourism Hoboken Historical Museum

Puffin Foundation

WithumSmith+Brown Lowenstein Sandler, LLC

The NBA

Big Sky Edit

Monster Remotes

Syracuse University Dept. of Film and Media Arts

Fairleigh Dickinson University School of the Arts - Filmmaking

East Brunswick Tech School of the Arts

Corporations and private donors

SHOWING

Allowed - Experimental

4 min. by Zillah Bowes, Cardiff, UK

Weeds aren't just weeds. They're like friends. During the first Covid-19 wave, plants and flowers were allowed to grow wild. Using 3D animated photos, the film lyrically re-examines our relationship with urban plant life in the urgent context of biodiversity loss and climate crisis.

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Wangechi Mutu: Between the Earth and the Sky – Documentary

15 min. by Ian Forster, NY, NY, US and Jackie Lebo, Nairobi, Kenya

From her Nairobi studio, internationally celebrated artist Wangechi Mutu unpacks her relationship with the natural world and the ways in which it has influenced her artistic practice. A self-described “city girl with a nature brain,” Mutu recounts her upbringing in Kenya. These experiences instilled a profound respect for both nature and the feminine in Mutu, alongside a curiosity about African history, heritage, and culture.

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Miles and Kilometres - Experimental

2 min. by Sonali Gulati, Richmond, VA, US

A lingering haiku poem of migration, separation, dislocation, and exile.

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A Parisian Circus - Documentary

11 min. by Hugo Besson, Paris, France

In January 2021, the Covid-19 crisis paralyzed the world, and circus artists were stopped. “A Parisian Circus” is an audiovisual collage, mixing the routines, thoughts, and artistry of these gifted circus performers.

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Babbit and the Dream Tree – Narrative

12 min. by Jeremy Mann, Oakland, CA, US

A creature named Babbit puts on a theater play to express his feelings through dance for the first time and is surprised by the result. Created by one person only, alone, in a room.

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Any Instant Whatever – Animation

5 min. by Michelle Brand, Hamburg, Germany

A man, in a room, in a film. Nothing is as solid as we believe. The film explores our perception of time and change, bodies and objects, and our inability to comprehend the full motion of things.

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The Sticklet Weaver – Documentary

7 min. by James Hollenbaugh, Harrisburg, PA, US

Brent Brown is a self-taught artist with lifelong mental health challenges. Intuitive and deeply talented, in recent years he began building complex, highly fanciful "puppets" constructed from dozens of cardboard elements with fully moveable joints. "The Sticklet Weaver" explores Brent's process and celebrates his unique artistic journey.

Ten Degrees of Strange – Animation

4 min. by Lynn Tomlinson, Owings Mills, MD, US

"Ten Degrees of Strange" is a music video based on a song by Robert Macfarlane and Johnny Flynn, from their album Lost in the Cedar Wood. Taking inspiration from The Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient story written on clay tablets, and responding to the strangeness of the global pandemic, Tomlinson’s stunning animated film is a story of loss and hope in nature told through colorful, shifting, changing, morphing, clay on glass animation.

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Charon – Narrative

16 min. by Yannick Karcher, Strasbourg, France

Freshly retired, a man doesn't know how to occupy his days. For fear of being killed by boredom, he gets involved in the crazy project of building a boat in the cellar of his suburban house.

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Digital Afterlives – Screen Dance

5 min. by Richard James Allen and Karen Pearlman, Surry Hills, New South Wales, Australia

A man in white-winged angel shoes in an infinite black space is awakened by the strains of Franz Liszt’s “Totentanz” (The Dance of the Dead). He is multiplied and manipulated through all the dimensions of infinite black. None of the incarnations of his body have free will as he is thrown, bounced, split, squelched, flopped, frozen, and slid through multitudinous geometries by an unknown force, finally to be returned to his original form and spat out onto the junk heap of history.

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Dawn – Documentary

4 min. by Timon Birkhofer, Pasadena, CA, US

Five unique individuals take us on a journey where their achievements shine beyond preconceived ideas of what is possible.

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For more information visit

THE THOMAS EDISON FILM FESTIVAL

Jurors for the Thomas Edison Film Festival (TEFF):

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Henry Baker began his career at the ground-breaking video arts facility: Synapse Video Center.  His work as educator, curator and director helped launch video as an art form in America.  He co-created the NYS Media Alliance.  As premiere video Paintbox artist, his work on award-winning and innovative videos includes the first MTV Video Music Awards: The Cars "You Might Think".  Establishing his own company enabled projects with Menudo, Celeste Holm, HBO, SONY, Panasonic and others.  You'll find his works in the permanent collections of the NY Public Library and Everson Museum of Art.  His award-winning documentary "PISS OFF" has been included in 40+ film festivals around the world.  He served as a dedicated juror for the National Endowment for the Arts, WNET-TV Lab, Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Thomas Edison Film Festival.  He resides with his husband in Washington DC.

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Margaret Parsons, Curator Emeritus, founded the film program at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.  She served as curator of film for the Gallery for decades and organized screenings related to film history, film art, and the role of time-based media in society.  She has curated media exhibitions and programs at embassies and cultural organizations including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, American University, the National Archives, the Smithsonian Museum of American History, and Smithsonian Museum of American Art.  She has served on the boards of film organizations ranging from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar to the Environmental Film Festival in the Nations Capital, and has been on the editorial boards for The Moving Image and the Getty Trust's experimental Art on Film in association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  She has been an international festival juror and in 2012 she founded Glimmerglass Film Days in central New York State.  For her work in film preservation Parsons has received awards from the governments of France, Georgia, Italy, and the Czech Republic, and in the US has been the recipient of life achievement awards from the Thomas Edison Film Festival, DC Independent Festival, and Women in Film and Video.  Her scholarship is in the field of outsider art and her articles have appeared in Raw Vision, Folk Art, The Folk Art Messenger, New York Folklore, Curator and The Moving Image.

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