The Virginia Film Festival would like to thank the Academy for the $20,000 grant it was just awarded, a healthy chunk of the $450,000 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave to U.S. film festivals to fund education and outreach programs in 2012. For the Virginia Film Festival, those outreach programs include family days, social service partnerships, and youth screenings, like this year’s screening of The Loving Story for Charlottesville High School students. This year was another record-breaking one for the festival, with 27 sold-out screenings and attendance levels at over 24,000, and in all probability, you’ll hear the words “record breaking” again after next year’s festival.
$20,000 was also the amount that UVA’s Office of the Vice Provost for the Arts awarded to Black Fire last week, a film project by art professor and filmmaker Kevin Everson and history professor Claudrena Harold exploring race at UVA between 1969 and 1985. In addition to the film, Everson and Harold will recreate Black Culture Week, which was started in 1970 by the Black Students for Freedom, later known as the Black Student Alliance. “Black Culture Week Remixed,” tentatively scheduled for February, will feature concerts from student ensembles and dramatic reenactments of speeches given during Black Culture Week in 1971. The other faculty art project chosen by the newly inaugurated Arts in Action on Grounds initiative is the “Arts Festival of the Moving Creature,” produced by the drama department’s Steve Warner, studio and gallery technician Eric Schmidt, and Melissa Goldman of the architecture school. The project will follow teams of students in the architecture, engineering, art and drama departments as they work through the 2012-2013 school year to create “moving creatures,” which will be unveiled in the spring of 2013.