Film Festival

1-15-10

You don’t have to go to Tribeca or Sundance to find an independent film festival.  Next week you can go to Cherry Valley. 
Thanks to the impressive ingenuity of Omonike Akinyemi – the award winning director who took on the roles of writer, producer, and director of Nelly’s Bodega – a local film festival is coming together.  Her slogan is “Experiment, Relate, Create.”
The Director’s Sennight – a Middle English term meaning week – is a new kind of festival that Akinyemi is bringing to Cherry Valley in an effort to inspire and aid budding local filmmakers and to draw out the local talent.
For a week the filmmakers, actors, and crews will gather and learn from each other as they create new short films. 
The eight-day festival, running Jan. 16 -23, will feature previous shorts made by the directors, shown before full-length films (ranging from Tableau Feraille to Tim Burton’s Batman) during the first seven days.
The eighth and final day of the festival is the major attraction: the presentation of the films created during the week.
The “struggle in this area is that filmmaking is stymied by two things: going to another city to get equipment and lack of actors,” Akinyemi said. 
This event will bring many filmmakers together in this rural area and harness the talents of actors brought in by statewide casting calls.
Akinyemi hopes “to expose [the area to] new film making and to help film makers make extraordinary stuff without restrictions.” 
Not only is it local, but Akinyemi’s own project is worthy of respect. She will present a film about Lady Ostapeck, the colorful local Victorian photographic portraitist.
Akinyemi, who attended Yale University before graduating from the MFA film production program at the University of Southern California, has run a production company, the Image Quilt, from 1 Main Street Cherry Valley since Jan. 2009. 
Through this project she can set her own rules and bring a “great education” in filmmaking to Cherry Valley.
The feature films of the festival will be shown at 7 p.m., Jan. 16-22 at various locations.  The Old School Café at 2 Genesee St..is the location of the final night’s attraction, beginning at 3 p.m. on Jan. 23, and featuring all of the completed Sennight Films.
Anyone interested in attending the week’s events should visit www.imagequilt.com or purchase the $7 tickets at the door.