Ainsworth to host 25th film fest

AINSWORTH — The 25th annual Brinton Film Festival comes to Ainsworth this weekend. Mike Zahs, longtime host of the event and restorer of much of the Brinton film collection, a set of 150 of the world’s oldest moving pictures.

The event starts at 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday with an ice cream social at the Ainsworth Opera House. The films screened at the yearly event consist exclusively of works made before 1908, rather than newly produced items.

Zahs said this year’s show would likely feature a Brinton film restored earlier this month that has likely not been viewed in over a century.

“This year is the 25th anniversary, and so we want to make it a little bit special,” he said. “If everything goes well, I will be able to introduce the audience to part of the Brinton collection that has not been exposed to the world since before 1900. I’ve tried for seven years to get this part of the collection in a format I could use.”

Converting the moving picture was not an easy task. Rather than capturing the production on a more modern medium, it was recorded on wax.

“When you think what happens to wax in 120 years … I never wanted to do anything with it,” Zahs said. “The technology has finally caught up so that just in the last couple years, we can work on this. There are two places in the world that can extract the information from the wax, and I got an email last night that it has arrived at the University of Iowa.”

The project was a long time coming. Zahs said he was glad it aligned with the festival’s anniversary.

“I started working on it seven years ago with the Library of Congress, and we have been working on it since,” he said. “It looked like, maybe, it could happen this year, so I started really putting emphasis on getting this material earlier this summer … part of it was for the 25th anniversary, but part of it was just to get it here. I’m old, I want to be part of it.”

Zahs said he was not sure how much of the material would be featured in this weekend’s festival, as it’s hard to pick a selection from a product hasn’t been viewed by anyone alive today.

“The Library of Congress said there was 30 pieces to this, and they felt each was unique on Earth,” he said.

The film festival will of course feature its usual attractions as well: magic lantern slides older than film itself, plus a handful of other movies from the Brinton collection. While the show is the same both nights of the festival, Zahs said it changed every year.

“People say, ‘Well, I’ve already seen the movies,’” he said. “But I’ve seen the movies hundreds of times and I still see new things in them. And it is amazing to realize that all this was done with hand-crank cameras and hand-crank projectors.”

For Zahs, a former history teacher, the movies are a thing of utmost importance.

“I’ve always been interested in local history, and this is an extremely important part of local history,” he said. “We’ve always been very supportive of entertainment. And what’s fun for me is I can show some of that entertainment where it was shown 100 years ago, three generations down from the people that saw it originally.”

The cultural importance of the films is hard to overstate, according to Zahs.

“It’s special, and it’s so close to home that it may not seem like it’s special,” he said. “This is a big deal.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com