Community Cinema Welcomes New Producing Partners: Louisville Film Society and KET

Producing Partners are local community organizations that co-present Community Cinema screenings across the country. Ken Wilson of Louisville, Kentucky with the Louisville Film Society shares some of his thoughts about becoming a Community Cinema and Community Classroom partner. BETWEEN THE FOLDS shows Thursday, Nov 19 at 3:30 PM at Fern Creek Traditional HS 9115 Fern Creek Rd. The film will be followed by a community discussion.

The Louisville Film Society in Louisville Kentucky

The Louisville Film Society has wanted for a long time to have a presence in local high schools – to foster both filmmaking and film appreciation. We found an ideal connection at Fern Creek. Fern Creek High School is a Louisville public school in a lower-middle class area where there is very little cultural activity.

With the encouragement of FC’s principal, Dr. Houston Barber, we have formed a film club and have begun turning their little-used auditorium into the site for our Community Cinema showings. Students have been given duties in publicity, set-up of equipment, and announcements and panel participation. One project we are planning to give the students is the shooting of an opening “Welcome, turn off your phones, here are our sponsors…” video. Eventually, students in the film club will be making films for a student film festival that will be part of the Louisville Film Society’s Flyover Film Festival, held in June. We are hoping their exposure to the subjects and techniques of the Independent Lens films will broaden and deepen their work.

Kentucky Educational Television

The alumni association at Fern Creek is very active. We are hoping that our monthly Community Cinema screenings will bring them back to school to engage with current students. We hope to raise students’ awareness of artistic, political, cultural questions and connect them to the wider community – and to raise the community’s awareness of those kids’ potential as creative, aware, productive citizens. We want to make enlarge the scope of Louisville’s artistic and intellectual life, and put film at the center of that life. We want people talking about, creating, and enjoying film and film’s subjects.

We want Fern Creek to become a cultural center for the area, and for it to become a destination for people from other parts of the city. The nature of Community Cinema – the range of its subjects and approaches – makes it a perfect catalyst for that kind of change. Ultimately the high school community will connect with the adult world around it – not in a hierarchical way, but as intellectual equals wrestling with interesting and important questions and issues. And as more and more people from outside the neighborhood hear of these screenings and discussions, Fern Creek will begin to matter more to the whole city.

We are partnering with the University of Louisville, with Kentucky Educational Television, and hope to have connections with film groups in Lexington and Paducah, Kentucky. As we begin to bring in panelists and organizations from around Louisville and Southern Indiana, we know formal and informal connections – with students, between organizations, and with the LFS – will begin to happen. We also want kids to make connections with students from schools around the city.

Read more about Community Cinema in Louisville>>>

I can see strong connections between most of these films and Louisville’s cultural and political life: We have a very strong music scene here, particularly indie music, so D Tour and Young at Heart will have instant appeal. Our Green Movement is really growing strong and we have a local filmmaker, Ben Evans who has made a great film about the ecological movement. It’s called YERT. Ben has already said he would be willing to be a panelist for Dirt! or Garbage Dreams. The American Printing House for the Blind is in Louisville. It’s the oldest such press in the country. We have a large, strong blind education program here. The Eyes of Me should get an excellent response.

I love docs. My list would include Titticut Follies, The Thin Blue Line, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, Koyaanisqatsi, Coal Country (just released… saw it at Bluegrass Bioneers. Every Kentuckian should see this film), Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s The Garden… So many…

On the border of a border state, Louisville is the South and it is the Midwest; it is a big city and a small town; it is progressive and conservative. It is full of questions and rich with answers, and staunchly independent. Its famous offspring often embody the quirkiness of the place: Mohammed Ali, Hunter S. Thompson… innovative indie rockers like Slint, Will Oldham, and My Morning Jacket.

But there are also those native sons and daughters like Diane Sawyer and Bob Edwards who can talk and listen. Louisvillians love to talk. And they love to eat, drink, and party. It is an outgoing, welcoming place that loves its own oddness. Sophistication is always cut by folksiness, intellectualism by blunt honesty and openness and humor, high art by funkiness. Boundaries – between people, political ideas, arts, genres – are fluid here. Our best restaurants and hotels are galleries (21C Museum Hotel was recently named the best hotel in North America). Our bars show indie films. Our annual Idea Festival mixes ecology, Shakespeare, and gourmet food.

Louisville is adamant about supporting independent businesses and local artists and musicians. Our Keep Louisville Weird Campaign was begun by a local independent music store, Ear X-tacy, named recently to the top 20 record stores in the country. Now independent businesses all over the city have organized under the Keep Louisville Weird and Buy Local First banners. When Starbucks first started sprouting around the country, they at first ignored Louisville. A local business, Heine Bros. Coffee spread in its stead. Other excellent roasters opened. When Starbucks realized what a great coffee town Louisville was, they showed up, but nobody cared. Our local businesses outshine them in quality and number. The seed for Borders was begun here as Hawley-Cooke Booksellers. Borders eventually bought them out, after taking their idea. Now our Charmichael’s Bookstore is the best bookseller in the country, according to Publisher’s Weekly.

Louisville’s activism is seldom confrontational. Its continuous support of integration, despite the Supreme Court, happens quietly. It merged, somewhat quietly, its county and city governments into a Metro system, so the whole area feels ownership of the city. Its biggest rock festival, Forecastle, is also an art and activism event. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. spoke at the 2008 rock festival. Protests concerning one of our biggest regional ecological issues – big coal and mountaintop removal –are done with poetic voices like Wendell Berry. Louisville has one of the highest per capita public funding support for the arts in the country.

Louisville is, then, a place that is constantly reimagining itself in odd and interesting ways. Art and ideas matter here, not as commodities or rubrics, but as surprisingly organic ways of living.

Tags: education, film society, KET, Louisville