Black Maria Film and Video Festival here Sunday

On Sunday, Feb. 22, at 4:30 p.m. in the Willard Straight Theatre, Cornell Cinema will present the 23rd annual Black Maria Film and Video Festival, with festival director and founder John Columbus.

Tickets for this show are $4. For more information, call 255-3522 or visit http://cinema.cornell.edu.

Named after Thomas Edison's famed 1893 experimental motion picture studio in West Orange, N.J., the Black Maria Film Festival returns to Ithaca for another program of cutting edge films made by some of the most prominent avant garde, documentary and animation film and videomakers from around the world. This year's slate will include new work by recent Cornell Cinema guest Bill Morrison ("Decasia"). His 35 mm "Light is Calling" is a wondrous experimental found footage piece based on the 1926 love triangle film "The Bells" by James Young.

Also on the program: Sandy McLeod and Gini Reticker's "Asylum," a powerful tale of a young African woman who flees her homeland to escape ritual female circumcision. The afternoon will begin with a special tribute to Stefan Sharf and his 1964 film "Selma to Montgomery," which reflects the influence of the great Sergei Eisenstein, with whom Sharf studied and worked. Montage-like sequences reveal the vitality and valence of the freedom marchers, together with Martin Luther King Jr., who trekked across the South during a critical phase of the American civil rights movement.

Columbus will present a different lineup of films on Monday, Feb. 23, at 7 p.m. in the Park Hall Auditorium at Ithaca College.