A selection of the movies from the 41st Annual Thomas Edison Film Festival will be screened for free on Wednesday April 6 in the Kutz Black Box Theatre of the Lackland Performing Arts Center at Centenary University.

The theatre is located at 715 Grand Ave., Hackettstown. The event begins at 6:30 p.m. Seating is limited and on a first-come-first-served basis.

For more than 40 years, the Thomas Edison Film Festival (formerly known as the Black Maria Film Festival) has been advancing the unique creativity and power of short form cinema, according to a release from the Centenary Stage Company. The festival embraces its mission to promote innovation and advocate for independent filmmakers through a juried international competition celebrating all genres and hybrids from filmmakers around the world.

It is an independent traveling festival for short film reaching out to diverse audiences with provocative, timely, edgy, and compelling new works by both accomplished and emerging filmmakers.

The festival was founded in 1981 by John Columbus, an artist/filmmaker from West Orange. He felt that the roots of experimental film in the 1960s and 70s were in many ways linked to Edison’s early experimental films, and worthy of attention. The festival was originally named for Edison’s film studio in West Orange. The studio’s resemblance to the familiar black-box shaped police paddy wagons sparked the nickname “black maria.” The festival’s relationship to Edison’s invention of the motion camera and the kinetoscope and his experimentation with the short film is an essential part of the festival’s history. All of Edison’s early films were short, he made 75 of them, each about a minute long. Today the Thomas Edison Film Festival continues to celebrate short films in their own right – not as a sidebar to feature length film, but as a poetic, unique and compelling art for all its own.

Christopher Young, CSC general manager, explained Centenary is still waiting for the festival selection committee to learn exactly which films will be screened. For more information about this event, visit centenarystageco.org or call the Centenary Stage Company box office at (908) 979-0900.

CSC remains committed to the health and safety of our community and adheres to all requirements set forth by the State of New Jersey. For more information regarding CSC COVID-19 policies and policy updates, visit centenarystageco.org/faq. ;

The 2021-22 season of performing arts events at CSC is made possible through the generous support of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the NJ State Council on the Arts, the Shubert Foundation, the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation, the Sandra Kupperman Foundation, the John and Margaret Post Foundation, and CSC corporate sponsors, including Platinum Season Sponsor The House of the Good Shepherd, Silver Sponsors Hackettstown Medical Center Atlantic Health System, Home Instead Senior Care (Washington), and Fulton Bank, Visions Federal Credit Union, and Centenary Stage Company members and supporters.