Cinema Columbus festival to screen films at several local theaters
This coming week, a new festival will blanket Greater Columbus with the best in independent film.
Cinema Columbus — a film festival presented by CAPA that was first announced in 2020 but delayed two years due to the pandemic — will feature screenings Wednesday through Sunday, May 1, at most of the major locally owned and operated movie theaters, including the Drexel Theatre in Bexley, Gateway Film Center and Studio 35 Cinema and Drafthouse, as well as the film/video theater at the Wexner Center for the Arts.
Films shown will run the gamut from a French-language fantasy (“Petite Maman”) to a program of short films by female directors to a documentary about former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick (“Kaepernick & America”). The first edition was largely curated by Gateway Film Center president and CEO Chris Hamel and Drexel Theatre Director Jeremy Henthorn.
The goal, said Cinema Columbus coordinator Molly Kreuzman, is to present area audiences with challenging and eye-opening films.
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“In so many ways, you can go into a film, you can experience a different culture than yours, you can experience a different lifestyle than yours,” said Kreuzman, adding that she wants to focus on films that might not be easily seen elsewhere.
“I really want to delve deeper and to find films that may not get those big festival plays,” she said.
Hometown boys make film
To kick off what organizers hope to be an annual festival that will attract submissions from independent filmmakers around the globe, Cinema Columbus will screen a new comedy-drama whose makers have deep ties to the community.
“Linoleum,” a comedy-drama, with a heaping of sci-fi elements, starring comedian Jim Gaffigan as an Ohio children’s science show host who, in an attempt to realize an ambition from childhood, starts toiling on a rocket ship of his own creation, will be shown at 7 p.m. Wednesday in the Southern Theatre. The supporting cast includes Rhea Seehorn, Amy Hargreaves, Michael Ian Black and Tony Shalhoub.
The movie, which premiered to acclaim at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas, in March, was directed by Colin West, a 34-year-old native of Upper Arlington now based in California.
The Ohio connection doesn’t stop there: Two of West’s high-school classmates in Upper Arlington, Chadd Harbold and Chad Simpson, are among the film’s producers. Several other Ohio natives are in the crew.
“It’s just one of those things where we all were making movies as kids,” West said. “We would do really crappy remakes of ‘Lord of the Rings’ or ‘Indiana Jones,’ just silly stuff. I think that was kind of a crash course.”
Even back then, Simpson said, the trio talked about their amateur cinematic efforts as being “training wheels” for their future careers.
“When other kids were doing popular kids’ social activities on the weekends, Colin and Chadd and I had our parents’ little cameras, or sometimes the school cameras at the high school, and we’d run around and make funny videos,” said Simpson, 35, who also lives in California.
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“Obviously, we’re not making anything groundbreaking, but we’re developing a fluency and a language (with film).”
Each of the three ultimately entered the film business, and as they began to establish their careers, they remained in contact.
“My personal goal (was) to make movies with my friends,” Simpson said. “Anything I can do to recapture the feeling that I had as a kid, as an adult, I want to do.”
The birth of ‘Linoleum’
With an eye to producing one of West’s scripts, Simpson read “Linoleum,” which West began writing in 2015.
“‘Linoleum’ kept raising to the top as being our favorite and one that we thought we could make,” Simpson said. “It took about three or four years for us to put a package together, round up the cast, with financing, and get it off the ground.”
The low-budget independent film was shot in 24 days in October and November 2020 in Kingston, New York.
“This is pre-vaccine and right after the quarantine phase of the pandemic, so the majority of our cast and crew had not been working on anything since March of that year,” Simpson said. “Everyone had this common goal of making the movie, and it was really inspiring and energizing to rally around one thing.”
Gaffigan delivers a sensitive performance that might surprise fans of his stand-up routines.
“There are funny elements, certainly, but the emotional core is what we were really focusing on in the movie,” West said. “Jim has so much range that people don’t even know about.”
Simpson said that festival screenings of “Linoleum” have convinced him the film plays best with large, live audiences.
“We need people to sit there in the theater together as a shared experience,” said Simpson, adding that a wider theatrical distribution is anticipated later this year.
For the time being, that makes Cinema Columbus a perfect opportunity to experience the film.
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“You can sit at home and watch any movie,” Kreuzman said. “But it’s a very different feeling when you’re sitting in a dark theater with a big screen and a couple hundred people. It becomes sort of this wave, and you all are carried along in this experience together.”
In the meantime, West — who previously made an ultra-low-budget movie, “Double Walker,” in Columbus in January 2020 — wants to keep making movies with his friends, including another one shot in Columbus.
“We want to bring film to Columbus,” West said. “It’s not that we’re the only ones making films in Columbus anymore. We felt like that in high school, but now you look around and there’s such an infrastructure in Columbus that didn’t exist.”
At a glance
The movie “Linoleum” will be screened as part of Cinema Columbus at 7 p.m. Wednesday in the Southern Theatre, 21 E. Main St. Writer-director Colin West, producer Chad Simpson, actress Amy Hargreaves and COSI president and CEO Frederic Bertley will participate in a post-screening Q&A. Tickets cost $10. Cinema Columbus runs through Sunday, May 1. For screenings, showtimes and more information, visit www.cinemacolumbus.com.
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