Description:

Since 1981 the annual Black Maria Film and Video Competition, Festival and Award Collection Tour has been fulfilling its mission to advocate, exhibit and reward the poetic, expressive, and insightful vision of independent film and video makers. The Black Maria is known for its national public exhibition program featuring a diversity of bold contemporary works through its tour of curated programs reaching audiences at museums, libraries, film societies, colleges and community institutions from coast to coast.

The Festival's roots are in New Jersey where just over 100 years ago the inventor Thomas Edison developed motion picture technology at his West Orange lab facilities which included the Black Maria, the world's first motion picture studio (a purpose built structure which incorporated a hinged roof and rotated on a circular track in order to follow the sun and illuminate the stage within). Acrobats, strong men, vaudeville performers, actors and dancers (such as Annabelle Whitford whose artful Serpentine and Butterfly dances challenged late Victorian mores), and a spectrum of people from all walks of life (including cowgirl Annie Oakley) were invited to the Black Maria to be filmed. This early history is part of the diverse fabric of film culture, but today the works exhibited by the Black Maria Film Festival explore the human condition as well as the creative terrain of the medium. They offer a mosaic of artistically conceived film and video forms (documentary, experimental, installation and animation as well as narrative) which the Festival Tour brings to audiences in settings that are conducive to a genuine appreciation of the work.

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