Independent films brought to Collins

A film festival that has traveled internationally and appeared last August at Bloomington's Buskirk-Chumley Theatre will appear at the Collins Living Learning Center, located at 541 N. Woodlawn, today and tomorrow from 8 to 10 p.m.\nThe festival is sponsored by the Collins Arts Council and the Department of Communication and Culture and will feature films by Collins residents for the first half hour.\n"The program highlights the importance of a rising movement of truly independent cinema and contains a collection of 'instant cult classics' shot on film and video," said Festival Director Scott Beibin in a statement. "You won't see a lot of these at the more mainstream independent film festivals."\nBased in West Philadelphia, the Lost Film Festival is an organized collective that focuses on screening in theaters and galleries, but also in unorthodox places like basements and warehouses. The organization promotes the idea that by using non-linear editing systems, digital video, and the Internet, motion pictures can be made on slim budgets.\nSome of the not-so-well known titles like the 8 minute "Piefight '69" depicts a pie fight that broke out at a San Francisco Film Festival in 1969 where two dozen radicals in costume descended on the red-carpet event with pies in hands. Another film runs 16 minutes and is called "The Horribly Stupid Stunt Which Has Resulted In His Untimely Death."\nThe film festival has previously been seen at schools like Oberlin College, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and other Ivy League universities like Harvard. \nSome feel the film festival is an important event because it allows a venue for non-mainstream films that may not see an audience under other circumstances.\n"They want more people to see that independent films that are interesting, smart, and funny can be made on very low budgets, and that these provide a necessary alternative to what we are fed by the Hollywood machine," said Collins Arts Coordinator Yara Cluver of the film festivals value.