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‘Back up to full speed’

Capital City Film Festival returns for a ‘fully revamped’ bash

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“It’s always our goal to find some sort of unused or vacant space to transform into a festival venue, and we always try to do a new one of those each year. Someplace different,” said Capital City Film Festival co-director Dominic Cochran.

This year, the old Sears building in Frandor will serve as the festival’s headquarters. The store and warehouse closed in 2020, and the Gillespie Group plans to turn it into a mixed-use entertainment, dining and housing development called “ROECO.”

“This was something that was on our radar. I was personally born and raised in Lansing, so I had been going there my entire life, and I knew that it was currently empty. I also heard news of the future development plans, so we thought we’d kind of hit the sweet spot where it might be available for that sort of thing,” Cochran said. “So, we reached out to the owners, and they were receptive, and now it’s the perfect space. We’re using about 30,000 square feet of the retail space for an art exhibit that has art from all seven continents, and we’re using the warehouse space for music and films.”

The festival, which starts today (April 5) and runs through April 15, is ramping back up to full scale this year after the COVID-19 pandemic. There will be a large art exhibit focusing on creativity during the pandemic as well as music, poetry, opportunities to meet filmmakers and, of course, a jam-packed schedule of film screenings.

“Creativity in the Time of COVID-19: Art for Equity and Social Justice,” on display at the Sears building, Impression 5 Science Center, REACH Studio Art Center, the Refugee Development Center and the Lansing Art Gallery and Education Center throughout April, tells the story of people disproportionately affected by the pandemic and the methods of creativity they used to cope.
“Creativity in the Time of COVID-19: Art for Equity and Social Justice,” on display at the Sears building, Impression 5 Science Center, REACH …
“In terms of our programming, I would say what’s really different this year is we have a massive highlight on Michigan films,” said co-program director William Corbett. “We’re opening with a movie called ‘Hundreds of Beavers,’ and that’s a tale that could have been set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the 1800s. It’s not made in Michigan — they’re from Wisconsin — but it’s a Midwest film. ‘Hayseed’ is going to be the closing night film, and that’s an Eaton Rapids murder mystery. We’ve also put a lot into the Fortnight Film Contest this year to revamp it. There’s a massive push for that, I think. The Michigan connections.”

The festival has also invited many of the films’ creators to attend so guests and other filmmakers can network and gain a deeper understanding of the movies they’re viewing.

“Almost all the films have live Q&As attached to them. If people want to have that connection with the filmmaker and meet filmmakers, almost every event is going to have a filmmaker present,” Corbett said. “We’ve also established a new networking event. About an hour or so after the Fortnight Film Contest happens, after our awards show, all the filmmakers will have time to hang out and network with each other, so we’re really hoping that goes well.”

“If there’s one other thing I could highlight this year, it’s that we have a big link between the films and poetry,” Corbett added. “We have a project going on called the CCFF Poetry Project. We’ve designated specific poets to come to film screenings, and they’ll take in the film and write a poem about it. They’ll all recite their poems at the start of the afterparty, and it’ll kick off the afterparty with this retrospective of every day of the festival through all their different perspectives.”

Poet-in-residence Nancy DeJoy said this year’s larger festival has allowed the Poetry Project, which took shape in 2022, to blossom.

“This year, we actually have a jazz band doing some backup for the poets, so that’ll be fun,” she said. “We also have a big surprise. One of our visiting artists is also a poet, and he’s been watching the videos that are going to be playing around the art exhibit, and he’s written a poem inspired by one of those.”

DeJoy is also the curator of the “Creativity in the Time of COVID-19: Art for Equity and Social Justice” exhibit, which will be on display at the Sears building, Impression 5 Science Center, REACH Studio Art Center, the Refugee Development Center and the Lansing Art Gallery and Education Center throughout April.

“The idea was to invite people from around the globe to send us creative artifacts they’d been making to cope with COVID, particularly people disproportionately affected by the pandemic. There are groups of people in the world who have much more limited access to resources — healthcare, food security, home security. Those people are disproportionately affected by things like pandemics,” DeJoy said. “We wanted to find a way to help to add their voices — their stories of despair and their voices of hope — to the stories that we’re telling about the pandemic. Not artists, but everyday people who are using creativity. Although some artists did respond to the call. Many artists were disproportionately affected by COVID.”

The exhibit will feature a host of events at the Sears building, starting with the opening reception on Thursday (April 6).

“There will be music. There will be cash bars. There will be free food. There will be live painting. There will be lots of interactive, fun things for people to do,” DeJoy said of the reception.

On Saturday (April 8), Aztec dancers will perform a Mexican Indigenous dance ceremony from 2 to 3 p.m., and from 1 to 2 p.m. April 16, two of the exhibit’s contributing artists, Emily Kray and Alexander Arce, will talk about the large poetry scroll they created.

“There’s going to be a lot of flexibility in the fact that we’re going to have a lot of artists coming in and live painting,” co-curator Fatima Konare said. “We might have a violinist come in and play as people walk around and immerse themselves in this environment, so we really just want a community-based space.”

The staff has worked tirelessly to ensure the exhibit is accessible to anyone who wants to enjoy it. There will be a lounge area in the middle of the space with comfortable furniture, a trauma counselor in a closed-off room, a sensory-overload room, breastfeeding and diaper-changing rooms, a room with toys for children and a room with water, snacks and additional seating.

“We’ve done everything we can to make all the members of our community feel invited. We have American Sign Language interpretation at all our main events. We’ve all worked with an organization called DisArt, so we understand neurodivergent needs and some physical needs and things like that,” DeJoy said. “We’re all really committed — all the students that have been working with us and who will be here as guides have had training and will be getting more training from DisArt and an organization called STQRY, which did all of our QR codes. Every piece of art has an audio description, in case somebody has a visual impairment, that you can access through the QR code on the label. The labels are in English, but the QR codes on the labels link to four other languages: Hindi, Mandarin, French and Spanish.”

Overall, DeJoy hopes the exhibit “inspires people to expand the story they know about the pandemic and its effects on people’s lives.”

“It’s easy for some of us to forget that the pandemic is raging in many parts of the world. We want to add the voices of people who sent us creative work to that story. Everybody that comes here will take away not the whole picture, but a bigger picture at least,” she said. “The other thing we’re really hoping is that they’re inspired to do something creative themselves. People are going to be able to draw on some of these walls, we’ll have markers and paint around, we’ll have sketchbooks people can take with them or leave us a page, and we’ll be pasting all of that up and adding it to the exhibit.”

Corbett hopes this year’s festival as a whole will encourage community members to “buy in” and become more involved in the future.

“I hope they come every year and tell all their friends about it and volunteer and make a Fortnight Film and just get involved in the whole process and the whole community,” he said. “There’s an active community that talks about this film fest year-round, and it’s very fun to be a part of. The more people put into it, the more they get out of it.”

He’s especially excited to showcase all the festival crew has done to transform the Sears building into a venue worthy of hosting one of Lansing’s biggest events.

“You drive past Sears, but then there’s something going on inside, and you can go and revisit that and see that nostalgia. I’ve been in there, I bought a coat with my mom, and then 10 years later I’m here and they’re painting the walls,” he said. “It’s just really cool to be a part of an event that’s like the last handprint on the building before they turn it into something else.”

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