re: black maria film festival this friday!!!!

29th Annual Thomas Edison Black Maria Film and Video Festival to Premier at Home Base, NJCU, on February 5
1/28/2010
The national tour of the 29th annual Thomas Edison Black Maria International Film and Video Festival, New Jersey’s only Academy Award-qualifying festival for documentary shorts, will premiere at its home base, New Jersey City University, on Friday, February 5 at 7:00 p.m. in Margaret Williams Theatre of Hepburn Hall, 2039 Kennedy Boulevard in Jersey City. Admission is free.

The 29th Festival features 70 award-winning works. Many of the filmmakers will attend the opening.

Among the award-winning filmmakers who will be present at the premier will be Glen Rock resident Jane Steuerwald, an NJCU professor of media arts, and video artist Henry Baker of Washington, D.C., whose 10-minute film, “Terrorist Activity Radio Hour,” will be screened on opening night.

In response to the rise of terrorism around the world, Professor Steuerwald and Mr. Baker revisit a live radio performance piece they first created in 1981 on WAER-FM. An intense sound/image collage, “Terrorist Activity Radio Hour” combines live call-ins, music, interviews, and dramatic readings with multilayered images and sound effects and unites the political, the philosophical, and the satirical.

Dennis Conors’ “Breaking Boundaries: The Art of Alex Masket,” a film that contains a soundtrack with music performed by the Diane Moser Quintet, which includes Andy Eulau, an NJCU adjunct professor of music, will also be screened at the opening.

Among other Festival works that will be screened at the NJCU premier are “Pickles to Nickels” by Danielle Ash of Brooklyn; “Gordita” by Debby Wolfe with Kaz Kipp, Maureen Morrsion, and Rebecca Ham of Los Angeles; “Missed Aches” by Joanna Priestley, Portland, Oregon; “Banana Bread” by Barton Katonah of New York City; “Sebastian’s Voodoo” by Joaquin Baldwin of Sherman Oaks, California; “The Regular” by Jamie Kirkpatrick of New York City; “Train” by Darius Clark Monroe of Brooklyn; and “Young Continent” by Sarah J. Christman of Brooklyn.