This summer, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts is showing movies by local and regional filmmakers. Tom Ludwig will show some of his short films on Thursday, June 9th. Chicago filmmaker Chris Hefner’s movie The Poisoner will screen on July 14th. Both films start at 6:30 p.m.
KIA curator Michelle Stempien says it all started when she and co-producer of the Teen Filmmaker Festival Kevin Park were dreaming up new programs.
“He mentioned to me that for local filmmakers it’s really difficult to find venues to show what they’ve been working on. Because usually they have to rent a space and it can be very expensive. So it can be a hindrance. And I started thinking wow, we have a really great space and this could be really great programming. And we could expose these filmmakers and their work to a whole new audience and introduce the KIA members to film in a whole new way," says Stempien.
Tom Ludwig teaches film at Education for the Arts. He says Stempien is right. There are only a few scattered opportunities for local filmmakers to show their work. There’s the web of course, but Ludwig says it’s just not the same:
“Posting on Youtube and all that, I just really…I just wonder where it’s going and how it’s being seen and I don’t think that it’s going to have the impact that it needs to have. Plus when you’ve got a darkened room and an audience, the lights go down and you’ve got their attention. And it’s not like somebody’s running to the store and they’re looking on their phone at your film and, ‘Oh, I’ll pick that up later.’”
Ludwig will show three of his short films at the KIA in June. He focuses more on putting images together rather than a narrative.
“It’s an intuitive process of working for film. It’s not storyboarded. It’s not scripted. It’s something where you recognize an image and I like to think there’s something inside that just says, ‘that is a nice image’,” he says.
Ludwig says often he’ll collect these images and then arrange them around a central idea.
“The whole meaning is not known to me till the film is done. So there’s something guiding it,” he says.
For his film Mu, Ludwig wanted to interview Ed Sanders of the 1960s band The Fugs. His brother knows Sanders - they both live in Woodstock, New York. Ludwig says Sanders was a little leery of filmmakers.
“He said he turned down 80 requests in the three years from filmmakers cause all they want to do is talk about The Fugs and the book he did on the Manson family,” says Ludwig.
So Ludwig decided to interview him about something else:
“I was working with the idea of impermanence and the levels of permanence, impermanence that exist in the universe. How, you know, the time frame out there is just billions of years. Our time frame is quite a bit smaller than that, but in our minds it’s probably as infinite as out there. So there’s these very strange dichotomies in there. So I just got him talking about some things so I interspersed that with the imagery I’ve got.”
Michelle Stempien says the audience at the KIA will not only get to watch these films, but also to talk about them with the filmmakers themselves. After each showing, there will be a Q&A.
Stempien says she hope to not only increase the audience for the KIA film series, but also the number of local filmmakers showing there. Stempien says right now KIA members have only been able to reach out to friends and acquaintances.
“To the point that filmmakers are starting to know about it and look to it as a possibility for them to show their work and contacting us,” says Stempien.
Filmmakers interested in becoming part of the program should contact Stempien at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.
