As Traverse City area denizens prepare for immersion in the Traverse City Film Festival, which opens July 31, the East Bay Branch Library is launching a festival of their own: the First Annual Traverse City Filmstrip Festival.
Kicking off Saturday with three mystery-related filmstrips, the festival features three additional dates during the next week and will show around a dozen low-tech, not-quite movies.
Dates and times of the Traverse City Filmstrip Festival are listed below with multiple strips shown each session revolving around a theme. Festival events are free and open to the public.
• Saturday, July 28, at 1:30 p.m. — "It's a Mystery”
• Thursday, August 2, at 6:30 p.m. — "Classic Folk Tales”
• Saturday, August 4, at 1:30 p.m. — "Weird and Wacky Stories”
East Bay library associate Rosie Flickinger conceived of the idea because she is a both a huge fan of the Film Festival and sad to miss much of it this year because of work. She plans to serve popcorn during the showings and has also devised crafts for children to do afterward.
"Since I have to work anyway I thought I'd do something fun,” said Flickinger, who puts on the weekly Little Wigglers story times at the library. "It's just a chance to get these cool stories out there. Some of them are so great, they just languish in our vault downtown.”
"This is just my fun way to provide homage to the film festival and provide something for the children,” she added. "And to get some free advertising for the East Bay Branch Library.”
Flickinger tapped the Traverse Area District Library's collection for the festival, choosing among the just over 200 filmstrips available only for in-house use. Most of the filmstrips are from the 60s, 70s and 80s and librarians at the various sites in the TADL system tap them regularly for Little Wigglers story times or other elementary school events. Some of the stories date back to books from the 1940s, even if the filmstrips are newer.
"There's some great stories where actually the books are now out of print but we have a filmstrip for them,” said Bernadette Groppuso, youth services coordinator at the main library. "We find that the kids are utterly fascinated by them, they've never seen anything like it.”
Filmstrips and their players are no longer made so as they wear out or break, they cannot be replaced. The East Bay automatic advance model dates to 1975 and, for the time, was the latest in a dying technology. Flickinger uses it weekly during her story times, finding the format just fits the attention span of the young attendees.
"They (the filmstrips) are slowly but surely wearing out,” said Groppuso. "When it's gone, it's gone. We'll have to figure out what to do when they're gone.”
The East Bay Branch Library is located at 1989 Three Mile Road N. For more information about the Traverse City Filmstrip Festival, call 922-2085.