Confessions of a Harrisburg Film Festival Judge

There are famous film festivals around the globe. Festivals such as The Toronto Film Festival. The Venice Film Festival. The New York Film Festival. And of course, The Cannes Film Festival. But there is another, just as prestigious film festival that takes place every year. That would be the Harrisburg Film Festival, hosted by the fine folks over at Moviate. Okay, maybe it’s not quite as renowned as Cannes or Venice, but hey, it’s still a fun time.

I remember, back in the day, even before my wife and I were running Midtown Cinema (and while we were as well) I participated in the festival as a judge. I did this five years in a row, back in the day. The festival got entries from across the globe, but it was still highlighted by many local filmmakers. There were narrative films of course, and docs as well, but my favorites were always the experimental films.

I remember one film, about two or three minutes long, which was a beautiful array of red kaleidoscopic images running through the projector. The filmmaker actually put his own blood on the celluloid (back when celluloid was used more often than digital) and it made for a delightful few minutes of cinema.

One of my favorite memories of being a judge was when we screened a John Waters movie and the Baltimore auteur gifted each of the judges with a handmade cement sculpture of a burger. Yup. Apparently Mr. Waters collects fake food, and he made some himself as well. These were burgers, made out of cement, that were sculpted to look like a Big Mac, a Whopper, and other fast-food burgers. I have the Whopper at home on a shelf as I type these words.

Another fun time at the festival was when we screened Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls. To project it correctly, Caleb Smith of Moviate fame, and one of the founding fathers of the festival, placed two 16mm projectors next to each other, each holding a reel of Warhol’s cult classic. He started the right side, then started the left side 20 minutes later. The side-by-side imagery, just as Warhol had intended, was a remarkable feat of cinematic engineering as the two reels came together then split apart again (and again and again) in weirdly perfect harmony. Nothing much really happened in the film, par for the course for Warhol, but I am fascinated by films that show nothing but the mundane. It’s cinema as ASMR. There were 106 people there when the lights went down. When the lights came up more than three hours later, there were just 24 of us cinema-loving stalwarts left in the screening room.

Yup. Good times indeed. I got to meet many talented filmmakers, including many from Central PA. My days of being a judge for the Harrisburg Film Festival were good times. It seems cinema is just part my lifeblood, whether I put it on film literally or figuratively. That’s it gang. See ya at the movies! 7

Kevyn Knox is a Writer, Artist, Pop Photographer, Film & TV Historian, Pez Collector, and Pop Culturist. He has written film reviews for FilmSpeak, Central PA Voice, and The Burg. His reviews & other ramblings can be found on his blog, www.allthingskevyn.com.