Oscar Shorts:
7pm | Friday, April 22. $8
Tree City Film Festival Official Selections:
5pm | Saturday, April 23 | $8
50 Hour Challenge:
7pm | Saturday, April 23 | $8
Shorties:
1pm and 4pm | Sunday, April 24 | $3
From the Sundance Festival in Park City, Utah, to the Telluride Film Festival in Telluride, Colorado, film festivals have brought the glitz and glamour of Hollywood to small towns. Northern Ohio and Southern Michigan residents have our own film festival: The Tree City Film Festival, which will celebrate its fourth year in downtown Sylvania this April.
Festival Foundations
Jennifer Archer, Executive Director of the Sylvania Community Arts Commission and festival organizer, explained how the festival began, “A year prior to our first festival, I had been involved in a 48-hour film challenge in Detroit and just came back from it in awe of that experience. I learned a lot and I went to my board with the idea to do something like that here.”
The heart of the festival is a competition similar to Archer’s original inspiration, the 50 Hour Challenge, where teams of filmmakers have 50 hours to write, film, and produce a short film. The short films, created in March with an eight minute time limit, will have their first showing to the public at this festival. “We have about 16 teams every year. It is a manageable number to be able to showcase all the films we’ve received in a nice time frame during the evening,” said Archer.
Kiddie Creations
Young filmmakers have also stepped into the fun with Shorties U, a four-week-long program (held in March) during which, kids from kindergarten to 12th grade learn about the filmmaking process and produced their own short film to be shown at Tree City. “What started as just wanting to do the 50 Hour Challenge, grew into the opportunity for kids to make films,” explained Archer.
The Shorties have been an important part of the event since the beginning, and have also had success outside of the festival. Just last year, two Shorties U films, Locker Avengers and Little Monsters, were presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston during their Family Films event, a night of short films made by children all over the world.
More Movies
“From day one, our strategy has been to start something that’s manageable, create a quality event, and then slowly expand what we’re doing,” Archer said. That expansion lead to this year’s Official Selections. These films are shorts from all over the world, chosen by the Arts Commission to be a part of the festival.
Tree City also screens the Best Short Film nominees from this year’s Academy Awards. “After the first year, one of our committee members said we should include something that the people locally wouldn’t be able to see. You’d normally have to travel to Ann Arbor to see these,” said Archer.
Experience the creative minds participating in Toledo’s filmmaking community, and see some internationally known shorts, during a full weekend of screenings.
Sylvania Historical Train Barn | 5717 Main St., Sylvania.
sylvaniaarts.org/tree-city-film-festival/
