THUNDER BAY — A Thunder Bay filmmaker is the driver behind a free online film festival set to launch in the city on Jan. 21.
The festival title is Spotlight on Academics .
It alludes to the fact that Ron Harpelle, along with Kelly Saxberg and other collaborators at Lakehead University, wants to provide educators around the world with a way to access quality films for classroom use, while at the same time giving academic filmmakers a higher profile.
Harpelle teaches history at Lakehead.
"These days lots of professors like me make films, but there are very few places where we can show them alongside the films of other academics," he told TBNewswatch.
Harpelle said the festival's other purpose is to "provide viewers with a place they can go where they are assured of the research quality of the film they are looking at."
In the festival's inaugural year, there are 50 films from around the globe, all of which were judged by filmmakers and academics.
"We judged them on the quality of the filmmaking and also on the quality of the research," Harpelle said.
Most of the films are documentaries less than 90 minutes long, and deal with contemporary issues.
Their focus falls under a broad range of subject matter including the environment, history and social justice issues.
One of the films– A Hundred Year Journey – is from Finland and documents a rare encounter between cultural objects, the heirs of their original owners and creators, and two museums.
Abandominium – from the United States – is a documentary about daily domestic life among four heroin-dependent people who live together in an abandoned building in Chicago.
A Canadian entry – The Antarctica Challenge – examines the impacts of climate change on Antarctica's land and wildlife.
"There are all kinds of different films, and I think people around here would welcome something different," Harpelle told TBNewswatch.
He added "There's something in it for everyone...It's all interconnected with our lives here as well. If it's about poverty in another part of the world, we can certainly relate it to poverty here. We have Canadian films that relate to Canadian subjects, and people can relate that in other parts of the world to what they're experiencing there."
Elaborating on what the festival offers for the filmmakers themselves, Harpelle explained that there's currently nowhere for them to get peer-reviewed.
"People either like them or they don't like them. They get accepted into festivals but that doesn't really mean much when it comes time for me to put it on my CV as something that is valuable and a product of my research."
Harpelle also noted that educators are always looking for ways to use the internet in their classrooms, but it's not so easy to find films for classroom use "because the internet is more like a giant warehouse than a specialty shop."
He said Spotlight on Academics provides educators with carefully-selected specialty items under one small roof.
The global pandemic, he said, has helped create changes in education due to an emphasis on online learning.
"It's a real revolution taking place on university campuses, because now we're all online with COVID, etc. You can look for films...[but] anybody can make one and put it on YouTube, but you don't know where fact ends and fiction begins. Our effort is to help people sort through the fact and fiction."
If it weren't for COVID-19, the festival organizers would have screened selected films before an in-person audience in Thunder Bay over a couple of evenings, but would still have offered screenings online as well.
"We want to reach out to people in Thunder Bay, but it's also important for us to make our connections and reach out to the rest of the world to draw attention to our festival and the kinds of things that we've programmed," Harpelle said.
All the films will stream for seven days beginning Jan. 21 on ResearchTV.ca
