Free Range Film Festival Celebrates 13th Season This Weekend

When Richard Hansen brought the DuSu Film Festival to the the Twin Ports several years back he wasn't the first game in town for alternative film. The Free Range Film Festival is now in its 13th year out there in the Wrenshall boondocks. "The Barn" is turning 100 this year so it will be an extra special time to show your face, settle in and enjoy out of the mainstream programming.

Nearly all of us have grown up on cinema and a large percentage of us will admit privately that more often than not the films Hollywood has been producing are all too often less than satisfying. For this reason Indie films and off-the-beaten-path film festivals have become so popular among film buffs.

This particular film festival has been dubbed “a farm fresh alternative to stale cinema” since it started screening films in 2003. To celebrate the barn’s important anniversary the festival has expanded the number of films it is screening to almost 40 as well as presenting a live improvised score with the Band “Portrait of a Drowned Man”. (I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds interesting.)

Annie Dugan, director of the Duluth Art Institute, is also the force behind this event, its chief organizer and advocate. “This year’s crop of films is particularly peculiar and delightful” says Dugan. “We have such a mix with lots of shorts so there's always going to be something that will capture as well as challenge our audiences. I feel like that is what watching movies together should be about.” This year’s lineup features a mix of animated shorts, narrative shorts and plenty of documentaries including a 10 minute short about a 90-year-old woman who tries bacon for the first time.

One thing that has happened after a baker's dozen festivals is that the event has gained a reputation as being fun and quirky. As a result, Dugan notes, they have been able to leverage this to acquire some really amazing work. “This year we were able to secure a film that made a big splash at Sundance called ‘Nuts!’ It tells the story of John Brinkley who tried to cure impotence with goat testicle implants and ended up inventing modern radio along the way. And a lot of it is done in animation!”

The festival features local filmmakers alongside national headliners. Brian Barber is returning to screen work that he and Paul Lundgreen from Perfect Duluth Day directed together: “Honeycomb Hideout” interviews Duluthian Rob Berry whose collection of cereal boxes is truly tremendous.

Showtimes
Friday, July 29th 7pm – 11pm
Saturday, July 30th, 2pm – 5:30pm and 7pm – 11pm

The two-day event is held in the barn at 909 County Road 4 just outside of Wrenshall, MN. You'll find the full schedule, driving directions and more at the Free Range Film festival website:
www.freerangefilm.com

Wordless Wednesday: The Barn and the Kissing Booth

Local Art Seen: The Sophronia Project (Don't Miss It)

Yesterday afternoon I finally made it to The Barn in Wrenshall, home of the Free Range Film Festival. Picture a rural Northern MN community with Grant Woods hayfields and cornfields shrouded with fog set on the outskirts of a laid back community of 399. This weekend for a brief snatch of time The Barn hosted The Sophronia Project, a collaborative digital multimedia event that is being shared in various locations about the state, including the Walker Art Museum, The PROVE Gallery in Duluth, and on September 11 the Duluth Art Institute.

Primary visionaries in this installation / interactive performance include artist Joellyn Rock, multimedia composer Kathy McTavish and netprov creator Rob Wittig. When I arrived to check things out there were a whole assortment of assistant collaborators including Tobin Dack (the electronic music man), Lizzy Siemens, and many more who are acknowledged fully on the Travelling Sophronia Facebook Page.

The collaborative project offers both physical and virtual space where participants may spin their own stories of Sophronia, an imaginary city invented (or discovered) by Italo Calvino and which appears in his book Invisible Cities.

The project is a full-scale interactive wonderment, a circus conceived for a new age, stimulating all the senses including the imagination. I share it here in hopes that you will mark September 11 on your calendar so that you do not miss it.

On the walls, the graffiti angel mixes text and digital imagery gleaned from the project database... In a glowing tent, the audience can play along with projected video and digital animations to become part of the carnival...

The mood when I arrived was suffused with energetic cheer as Ann Gumpper and others attended to assembling the final embellishments on the tent housing the heart of this audio/visual experience. My photos here only hint at what the project is like to experience.

For more information about Sophronia, visit http://robwit.net/sophronia/

Joellyn Rock is a fiscal year 2014 recipient of a Career Development grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council (www.aracouncil.org) which is funded in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, Minnesota State Legislature, and The McKnight Foundation. Graffiti Angel in Sophronia was first presented at Northern Spark 2014 with the support of Northern Lights.mn and the Walker Art Center. Special thanks to the Motion and Media Across Disciplines Lab at University of Minnesota Duluth.