The Athens International Film + Video Festival will take place Monday through Sunday. Here’s some information on the festival itself.
Only 85 short film festivals are qualifiers for the Academy Awards. Thirty-one are based in the United States. And one can be even be found in Athens.
The Athens International Film + Video Festival is a qualifier for the Best Animation, Best Narrative and Best Experimental short film Oscar categories. Those who receive first place in the three categories go on a list to potentially receive an Oscar nomination, David Colagiovanni, the director of the festival said.
The 43rd annual Athens International Film + Video Festival, the second longest running film festival in the state of Ohio, will take place Monday through Sunday at The Athena Cinema, 20 S. Court St.
Curfew, a short film about a man whose estranged sister asks him to look after his niece, was screened at the Athens International Film + Video Festival in 2012. The film took home second place in the film festival for the best short film overall. It went on to win an Oscar at the 2013 ceremony for the best live action short film.
Preparation for this year’s Film + Video Festival started in August 2015 with a call for submission, Colagiovanni said.
According to the Film + Video Festival’s official website, there are three ways a filmmaker can submit a film for viewing: through websites called Withoutabox and FilmFreeway or by mailing the submission. Colagiovanni said the festival received 1,900 submissions and they selected 257.
Colagiovanni said there are “many different aspects” inspected when choosing which films will be shown.
The week leading up to the festival, Colagiovanni said, is full of doing small tasks and getting everything ready. Colagiovanni said he and his staff put together guest packets, decide on awards, write thank you notes, make sure the catering is in order, download films and perform many other responsibilities the week prior.
“There’s a lot of stuff that happens the week before,” he said. “They’re all little things, but there are a lot of little things.”
The Athena works in conjunction with the film festival office. The theater has to get the films into the system, make sure there are backups of all the films and get them in the appropriate order for the screenings, Alexandra Kamody, the director of the Athena, said. In order to make this happen, she said the Athena’s technical team works with the the film festival’s technical team.
“The main difference between the film festival screenings and the screenings you would see more regularly at the theater (is that) a lot of those are short films,” Kamody said. “So it’s all of these collections of short films (and) it takes a lot of work to prepare that.”
The theater also prepares its staff of mostly students to make sure they know the correct ticket prices and how the event works, Kamody said. She added that every show has to be entered into its computer system with the appropriate costs for admission.
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The office for the International Film + Video Festival and the Athena partner up for a couple of regular events the theater normally puts on, Kamody said. The theater will be showing another Science on Screen film, Embrace of the Serpent, during the festival. She said they are also hosting acclaimed filmmaker Charles Burnett for the screening of two of his films — Killer of Sheep and To Sleep With Anger. Kamody added that most of the theater’s programs are not scheduled for the week of the festival.
“We do put everything on halt,” she said. “Nothing else is programmed during the week of the festival. These exceptions are things we have worked on for months with the film fest director.”
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