This story originally appeared in The Centre County Gazette.
It’s time once again for the Centre Film Festival, and this year’s event will take place from Monday, Nov. 11, through Sunday, Nov. 17, at theaters in State College, on the Penn State campus and in Philipsburg.
As always, there will be a wide range of films from full-length features and documentaries to short films, and from domestic to international and even locally produced.
Many of the films will be presented live in the theaters and all of them, plus many others, can be viewed anytime online.
Professor Pearl Gluck, the festival’s artistic director, spoke about the event and gave her thoughts about what she thinks will be another entertaining, interesting, thought provoking and very successful slate of films.
“We start planning pretty quickly for our festivals, probably within a month or two after the previous festival ends,” Gluck said. “So we start thinking ahead, but we wait until the football schedule gets released to pick a date because we have to be on an away game if that is possible.”
The films for each festival are chosen by a committee and by Penn State film students, who watch many films and evaluate them.
“We don’t really have a specific set of criteria,” Gluck said, “but we have a programming committee and we break it up. There are about 650 films that come in and these get divided among our different viewers.
“We have two freshman seminar classes. Those are our students who come in and one of their first assignments is to watch student films from all over the world and rate them according to the criteria that’s part of the film course where they study the structure, the cinematography, the story and other elements.
“They then rate them from one to 10 and from there we have people from our committee who then take a look. Sometimes two or three of the students end up watching all of them or most of them and then they help us to make decisions with their point of view.
“We look for a variety of voices and for different points of view. The criteria is not very specific in the sense that when it comes down to it, we make some final decisions with what the committee feels that people would like to see here or conversations that we may like to have locally.
“We have a number of films that are dealing with some subject matter that is really important to our students here, whether it’s being about refugees or issues with the war in Ukraine or the Middle East.
“And this year we have a bunch of comedy films. I’m thrilled because you know we’re a very new festival and so we tend to have to ask for certain films to get them to be submitted. We got a lot of really terrific comedies that are making the rounds and one of them was shot here in State College. So we’re pretty excited about that one.”
Gluck was asked what she liked about this year’s list and what she was looking forward to most.
“I mean I want to say everything,” she said, “but I really feel the idea that we can show films from a point of view that maybe not all of us agree with, but it starts a good conversation.
“There are many really entertaining films that afterward can lead to really good conversations.
“For example, one film, ‘Running on Sand’ is a sports film, but more. It’s about a soccer team in Israel that misidentifies a black player. The club thinks he is their player, but he is actually a refugee.”
Gluck noted how this was just one of many unique selections this year.
“This is really part of what I love about the films this year. We have the different genres looking at some important things that are very real for people, and the audience has an opportunity to see the power of storytelling and of film.”
Gluck also said that the fest has films that will appeal to a wide variety of movie goers, noting that there is something for everyone.
Ticket information and schedules can be found at the Centre Film Festival website, centrefilm.org.
