Archive: Arts & Entertainment

The Streets Alive! Film Festival is a free public event in downtown Ithaca presenting over twenty short films about bikes, livable streets, and moving beyond the automobile.   Drawing on examples from across the country and around the world, these short films provide an off-beat and humorous take on creating sustainable mobility and great urban neighborhoods. The films are sourced from StreetFilms.org and the Filmed-By-Bike Film Festival from Portland, Oregon, and are juried for their relevance and interest to Tompkins County residents.

The first half of the evening features StreetFilms, short films that show how smart transportation design and policies can result in better places to live, work and play. Streetfilms are fun, short, smart and to the point; they package complex concepts into easy to understand and accessible videos.

The second half of the event is a rescreening of films from the Filmed By Bike Festival, a bike-themed movie festival held annually in Portland, Oregon.  Drawing on submissions from all over the world, Filmed By Bike films display bike culture in its great diversity and with great artistry.  Highlights are sure to be Manquer and Skiboys, two classics of the bike culture film genre, as well as new gems never been seen before in Ithaca.

The evening also features a brief public introduction to the new Bike Walk advocacy group in town and plans for the year ahead. Overall the evening promises to be a source of inspiration and conversation for all things bike, walk, active transportation, livable streets, open streets, healthy activity, community art, human scaled cities, and more.

This film festival rescreening series was first brought to Ithaca in September 2011 as the Livable Streets Film Festival as part of the Upstate Transportation Forum.  The energy generated from that film festival helped launch Streets Alive! in May 2012 as well as numerous initiatives for improvements to sustainable transportation in the area.

The Streets Alive! Film Festival takes place at Cinemapolis in Ithaca NY on Thurs March 13, 2014.  It is free and open to the public.

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