Lane College kicks off first film festival

JACKSON, Tenn. — One local college is gearing up to have their first ever film festival.

The Lane Doc Fest started Wednesday. To kick it off, the festival is showing the 1975 movie “Cooley High” directed by Michael Schultz. 

“Friday we have a V.I.P Dinner at 4 o’clock then we’re going to have a sneak preview of some of the films, because we’re not showing all the way through except for Friday night, a couple of them we hand picked,” says director of Lane Documentary Film Festival, Paul Rivas.

The festival is a two-day event. On Saturday there will be an awards show, a mixer, and a red carpet event. The festival features films from categories like humanities, black history, equality and more. 

“We’ve got some entertainment from Korea, Taekwondo, some musical groups so it’s going to be a pretty extensive show and we’re going to have clips kind of like the academy awards, clips of the winners and the finalists,” Rivas says.

With over 300 submissions, organizers hope the festival can become an annual event.

“It was 357 submissions from, I think 57 countries. It was over 50 countries which is really impressive. When we were asked to do this, I was not thinking it was going to end up like that. We had a lot of help from Christopher Lee who’s out in California,” says Rivas.

This is the first film festival Lane College has held, and possibly one of the first in Jackson. The event is free and the screenings will be held in the Chambers-McClure Academic Center.

“We know that a lot of times it’s hard to get support when you haven’t done it yet. We’re hoping now we can show the numbers and say ‘look, from now on this is going to be viable, we’re going to be doing this and we’d love to get the community involved and expand on it more,” Rivas says.

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