Holly Hey, Associate Professor of Film, The University of Toledo

Holly Hey, a filmmaker and faculty member of The University of Toledo Department of Theatre & Film, will screen one of her films in the internationally recognized Aesthetica Short Film Festival in November. The Aesthetica Film Festival, accredited by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), is a celebration of independent film, and an outlet for championing and supporting short filmmaking. The festival includes a rich selection of films from across the world, in genres including advertising, artists’ film, music video, drama and documentary. Her film emerged successfully after two highly competitive rounds of selection review.
Ms. Hey says that “the dum dum capitol of the world” is a first person experimental documentary and a moving image meditation that contemplates landscape, home, recollection, queerness, and time.

From Holly Hey’s short film “dum dum capitol of the world”

The project uses personal history to reflect on universal themes about home, life, love, parenting, memory, and death. Professor Hey began the project in 2005 when she received major funding from LEF Moving Image Foundation. She later received major funding from the University of Toledo in 2012 and completed the film in 2014.

To date, “the dum dum capitol of the world” has also screened in several U.S. festivals including The Ann Arbor Film Festival (the largest and longest running annual celebration of independent and experimental film and video in North America), the Athens Film Festival in Athens, Ohio, The Queens World Film Festival in New York, as well as The Moon Rise Film Festival in British Columbia.

Ms. Hey is currently an Associate Professor and Head of the Film Program within the Department of Theatre and Film. She holds a MFA in filmmaking from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She makes a broad range of work that can be seen in galleries, film festivals, live performances, and on television. Her works have screened both nationally and internationally, and The National Educational Telecommunications Association (N.E.T.A.) distributes her last major release “Rat Stories” that has been aired on PBS affiliates within the United States, British Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

The Aesthetica Short Film Festival – 2015 http://www.asff.co.uk/

Scene from “The Lady Vanishes” directed by Alfred Hitchcock

The University of Toledo Department of Theatre & Film will present a series of classic movies projected from 16mm film. Commercial films across the U.S. and shown locally are digitally projected in today’s world. These classic films will be shown as they were intended—on actual film. Please join us. The films will be shown at 7:30 p.m. in the UT Center for Performing Arts, Room 1039.

Below is a list of the films in the series.

Fall 2015
1. Friday September 4th
The Lady Vanishes directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1938, 96 minutes, starring Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave

2. Friday October 2nd
Seven Samurai directed by Akira Kurosawa, 1954, 207 minutes, starring Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Tsushima

3. Friday November 6th
His Girl Friday directed by Howard Hawks, 1940, 92 minutes, starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell

Spring 2016
4. Friday February 5th
Breathless directed by Jean Luc Goddard, 1961, 90 minutes, starring Jean-Paul Beimondo, Jean Seberg, Daniel Boulanger

5. Saturday, March 19
Student Filmmaker’s Showcase
The best of student films chosen in juried competition

6. Friday April 1st
Stagecoach directed by John Ford, 1939, 96 minutes, starring John Wayne, Claire Trevor, Andy Devine

Tickets are $10 general admission and $5 for students, faculty, staff, alumni, seniors and members of the U.S. military. Tickets include complimentary soft drink and popcorn. Advance tickets are available through the UT Center for Performing Arts Box Office (M-F 12-5 p.m.) and one hour prior to show time. The Center for Performing Arts is located on UT’s main campus at Towerview West and West Rocket Drive.

CONGRATS to FILM Alumnus Nathan Elias (VPA ’11)! His short film “The Chest” was accepted into the 2015 Cannes International Film Festival, located in Cannes, France. Elias directed, co-wrote and co-starred in the film. The dramatic short is about three dysfunctional siblings battling over their father’s possessions after his death. The Cannes Film Festival is invitation-only and being accepted is one of the most prestigious honors for filmmakers.

http://sub.festival-cannes.fr/SfcCatalogue/MovieDetail/2142fd52-66b4-49be-a806-3aab3ed3e23a

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm4229136/?ref_=nmbio_bio_nm

Photo: Nathan Elias, filmmaker. BA in Film from the University of Toledo, 2011.

Midsummer Borrowings events on campus

The College of Communication and the Arts (CoCA) celebrated its annual Arts and Humanities Festival with a series of events in collaboration with the Toledo Symphony Orchestra (TSO) and its production of “Midsummer Night Mysteries,” March 27-28. UT students and faculty took part in the Symphony production at the Peristyle. Leading up to the performances, CoCA presented related lectures, a concert and a film screening on campus.

Friday film screening
On Friday, March 20 in the Haigh Auditorium of the Center for Visual Arts, a screening of the 1935 Max Reinhardt film A Midsummer Night’s Dream was introduced by Dr. Matt Yockey, Assistant Professor of Film in the UT Department of Theatre & Film.

Nominated for Best Picture, this film adaptation of Reinhardt’s successful Hollywood Bowl production of the Shakespeare play includes extensive use of Felix Mendelssohn’s music as re-orchestrated by Erich Wolfgang Korngold and ballet sequences choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska. The cast includes Mickey Rooney, Olivia DeHavilland and James Cagney, among many other familiar names and faces.

Sunday Great Gallery concert by Bezonian Trio
On Sunday, March 22, the Bezonian Trio featuring Antonina Chekhovskaya, soprano, performed in the Toledo Museum of Art’s Great Gallery. The concert featured pieces that recall two of Shakespeare’s most famous plays – Macbeth (Beethoven’s Piano Trio in D major, Op.70 #1 “Ghost”) and Hamlet (Ophelia’s Song by Dimitri Shostakovich). The Bezonian Trio is comprised of Merwin Siu (violin) and Damon Coleman (cello) of the Toledo Symphony, and Dr. Michael Boyd (piano), professor of piano at The University of Toledo.

Mendelssohn’s Music, Reinhardt’s Diaphanous Damsels, Shakespeare’s Fairies
On Wednesday March 25, Matthew Wikander, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of the UT Department of English, presented a lecture about fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“We are spirits of another sort,” the fairy king Oberon reminds Puck as Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dreamers awaken into morning. Puck has just been describing the dawn as a time when “damned spirits” return to their “wormy beds”—a kind of reverse zombie apocalypse. Oberon’s and Puck’s disagreements do not begin or end here, but this interchange raises the question of what kind of fairies the fairies in Shakespeare’s plays are, and, by extension, the further question of how to represent them. This talk focused on the problem of representing fairies musically, in Mendelssohn’s incidental score, cinematically, in Max Reinhardt’s film version of his famous stage production, and poetically, as the fairies appear in Shakespeare’s text.

The College of Communication and the Arts (CoCA) celebrated its annual Arts & Humanities Festival with a series of events in collaboration with the Toledo Symphony Orchestra (TSO) and its production of “Midsummer Night Mysteries,” March 27-28. UT students and faculty took part in the Symphony production at the Peristyle. Leading up to the performances, CoCA presented related lectures, a concert and a film screening on campus. More on those in another post.

Midsummer Night Mysteries with TSO

Mendelssohn’s ethereal Overture, effervescent Scherzo, and iconic Wedding March highlight the first half of “Midsummer Night Mysteries.” The North American premiere of Volker David Kirchner’s Labyrinthos presented the Bard’s fairies, lovers and comic sidekicks, alongside music inspired by the Italian Baroque master Claudio Monteverdi. Stephan Sanderling conducted and Cornel Gabara, associate professor of Theatre and Head of Acting at UT, directed and portrayed the dual character Egeus/Bottom.

A number of UT students and faculty participated in the performance. UT faculty who acted in the show included Irene Alby, Lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Film, who played Hippolyta/Titania and as mentioned above, Gabara played Egeus/Bottom.

UT Theatre students involved in the production included Ian Davis as Demetrius; Jeffrey Burden as Oberon/Theseus; Nolan Thomaswick as Lysander; Victoria Zajac as Hermia; Keely-Rain Battle as Puck; and Elif Ertürk as Helena. Students also doubled up and played other roles, such as the mechanicals and fairies.

Set design was done by Gabara; costume design was done by Daniel Thobias, Assistant Professor of Theatre and Head of Design in the Department of Theatre and Film; and lighting was handled by James S. Hill, retired chair of UT Department of Theatre & Film.