Centenary University To Host 2022 Thomas Edison Film Festival 

Centenary University will be hosting a free screening for the 41st Annual Thomas Edison Film Festival. This event will take place on Wednesday, April 6 at 6:30 pm in the Kutz Black Box Theatre of the Lackland Performing Arts Center located on the campus of Centenary University at 715 Grand Avenue, Hackettstown, NJ 07840. The Thomas Edison Film Festival is free to attend and open to the public. Seating is limited and on a first-come-first-served basis. For more information go to centenarystageco.org or call the Centenary Stage Company's box office at (908) 979-0900.

For over 40 years, the Thomas Edison Film Festival (formerly known as the Black Maria Film Festival) has been advancing the unique creativity and power of the short form. The festival passionately embraces its mission to promote innovation and advocate for independent filmmakers through a juried international competition celebrating all genres and hybrids from filmmakers around the world. Thomas Edison Film Festival is a socially conscious, modern, fiercely independent traveling festival for short film. They reach out to diverse audiences with provocative, timely, edgy, and compelling new works by both accomplished and emerging filmmakers hybrids from filmmakers around the world.

The Thomas Edison Film + Video Festival was founded in 1981 by John Columbus, an artist/filmmaker from West Orange, NJ. He felt that the roots of experimental film in the 1960s and 70s were in many ways linked to Edison's early experimental films, and worthy of attention. The festival was originally named for Edison's film studio in West Orange, NJ, the studio's resemblance to the familiar black-box shaped police paddy wagons sparked the nickname "black maria". The festival's relationship to Edison's invention of the motion camera and the kinetoscope and his experimentation with the short film is an essential part of the festival's history and mission. All of Edison's early films were short, he made 75 of them, each about a minute long. Today the Thomas Edison Film Festival continues to celebrate short films in their own right - not as a sidebar to feature length film, but as a poetic, unique and compelling art for all its own.

This Thomas Edison Film Festival will take place on Wednesday, April 6 at 6:30 pm in the Kutz Black Box Theatre of the Lackland Performing Arts Center at 715 Grand Avenue, Hackettstown, NJ 07840. This event is free to attend, and seating is limited and on a first-come-first-served basis. For more information about this event, visit centenarystageco.org or call the Centenary Stage Company box office at (908) 979-0900.