Athena Hosts Annual Film Festival
The Athena Cinema hosted the annual Athens Film Festival in what has become a well-known tradition that just entered its 40th year.On top of reaching a historic marker in the festival’s history, Theater 3 was renamed after former Executive Director of the Cinema, Ruth Bradley. She worked in conjunction with Ohio University as a professor in the School of Fine Arts and as the festival’s director. She has since retired from teaching and as the director of the theater. Bradley, who maintains her position as the executive director of the Athens Center for Film and Video, plans and does much of the work surrounding the festival.After purchasing the theater in 2001, the school initially had a private manager running the cinema. Several years later, the theater was turned over to the College of Fine Arts and was put under Bradley’s direction. When that happened, the Athena became more of an art-house theatre, moving more towards educational and non-traditional films.The festival itself has acquired a reputation for showcasing unique, experimental and avant-garde films.“We kind of show stuff that you can’t see anywhere else, Managing Director Alexandra Kamody said. “A lot of film festivals can claim that, but I think here, Ruth really tends to select things, her and her team of students pick things that might not have had the chance to show at a bigger festival and give them the chance to test it out on an audience and see how it goes.”The festival is also respected for bringing in films from all over such as New York, Los Angeles, Canada, Europe and the Middle East, making it a diverse and ambitiously impressive undertaking. Both Kamody and Executive Director Chris Iacofano said that there were nearly 1,000 movies watched between the two of them, Bradley and the volunteers through the Athens Center for Film and Video.There has also been a great deal of changes in the overall make-up of the festival in recent years. Whereas before, several hundred films were submitted and solicited, as compared to the nearly 1,000 now. The formatting of the films is moving away from physical formats like discs and moving toward things like jump drives and portable hard-drives instead. There are now eight different formats that the films are shown on.Within the film industry, a gradual – and to some, gut-wrenchingly sudden – change is taking place, and Kamody said the effects are felt in the cinema as well.“The industry is really moving away from film and moving more toward digital,” Kamody said. “It is a bittersweet moment because film is kind of this precious thing to everybody involved. Whether you are a filmmaker or you’re threading it and playing it. So we are still going to be able to show film, we will keep that ability here.”It is a nearly year-round process for the Cinema and the Film Center. There is the fundraising that Bradley leads, the films are often submitted early-to-mid winter with the deadline consistently in February and films are watched in bundles leading up to the festival. Even with all this, there is plenty more to be done.“Before that though, there is still a lot of planning going on. You know, there are grants to be written … Ruth does a lot of fundraising for the festival, and that happens prior to that. And really once winter semester hits, then it’s just go-go-go. There is a thousand movies to watch, and a lot of planning to be done, there are feature films to be booked,” Iacofano said.The Center itself has paid for many movies designated for limited release.Now the cinema and the film center are going through a cleanup process. Bradley is in the process of shipping film back to the filmmakers. Final reports are written to organizations and entities that provided grants. Iacofano said that these people really want to hear how the event went. After this, there is somewhat of a lax period in June and July, but after that, the process and preparation begin again. As for now, things are still busy at the theater, and quite hectic for Bradley, but at the Athena, things are at least somewhat winding down.The directors both were fairly happy with the turnout, noting that students from the film and arts schools came out in fairly large numbers to watch films. Arts for Ohio also made free tickets available to students, which helped to enhance the turnout. Iacofano said some of the bigger turnouts for films were those made by Ohio University students or local residents. In such cases, friends and family of the filmmaker, as well as people who helped work on the film showed up in respectable numbers for support or to see their finished product recognized.But with a variety of events taking place in Athens in April from fests to athletic tournaments to the literary festival, Athenians and many of the college students who might have attended did not have much of a chance. Even with the solid turnout, Kamody could not help but feel like these events could mutually benefit from working to coordinate in the future.“We will have to work next year to see how we can all compliment each other and not work against each other,” Kamody said.In the end, those involved seemed to be quite happy with the festival.“We were really happy with the turnout,” Iacofano said. “We have a great crew working here. A lot of them have been with us through at least one festival in the past. So, you know, I think that that experience, the student workers especially helped us run very smooth.”Ruth Bradley could not be reached for comment concerning the festival.