- By Wharton Studio Museum
- Entertainment
Print 
Wharton Studio Museum, Okumu Productions, and Ithaca College's Roy H. Park School of Communications are pleased to announce that Silents Roar!, a silent short film festival for youth in the Southern Tier, is returning April 18th, 2020. The festival premiered in 2017.
Inspired by the role Ithaca and its surrounding region played in silent movie history over a century ago, Silents Roar! was conceived to recreate the same unique challenging aspects of making a silent film like our predecessors so many years ago. It is an exciting opportunity for youth ages 11-18 in the Southern Tier to explore filmmaking and direction by creating their very own silent film short.
Information about Silents Roar! Youth Film Festival was sent to all middle and high schools in the Southern Tier. Entrants produce a black & white silent film, 3 minutes in length, and follow other guidelines listed on the Festival's registration page. A screening and awards ceremony celebrating all applicants will be held Saturday, April 18th, 2020 at the Roy H. Park Auditorium at Ithaca College from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm.
All submitted films will be reviewed by a jury panel consisting of film professors from Ithaca College and other community media producers. Trophies and other prizes will be awarded. Silents Roar! is produced by Wharton Studio Museum, a local nonprofit committed to preserving and celebrating Ithaca's role in early American filmmaking.
The Festival was originally conceived of by Fiona Okumu when she was a senior at Ithaca High School in 2016. Okumu is currently attending Ithaca College, where she is majoring in Writing for Film, TV, and Emerging Media.
Okumu's vision is to give local youth a forum to explore their interest in film as an art form or career by creating narratives that will employ themes and genres relevant to them.
"I only found out about Ithaca's silent movie history when I was a junior in high school," Okumu said. "I then contacted Mayor Myrick, and, at his suggestion, got in touch with Diana Riesman at Wharton Studio Museum, and told her about my idea for a silent film festival that would pay homage to the Wharton, Inc. Studio."
From 1914 to 1919, Wharton, Inc. Studios -- created by filmmaking brothers Theodore and Leopold Wharton -- was a bustling motion picture production studio here in Ithaca, NY, that produced hundreds of reels of films starring some of the best-known actors of the era. Located in what was then called Renwick Park (now Stewart Park), the historic Wharton Studio building is one of only a handful of original silent film studios still standing in the country, an important artifact that this region is lucky to have. Wharton Studio Museum plans to develop the building into the Wharton Studio Museum and Park Visitor Center.
v16i5