Independents Day

941 Theater gives three local filmmakers a shot on the silver screen.

by Molly Eichel

[ filmadelphia ]

Courtesy of 941 Theater TIME WARP: The glamorous past is juxtaposed with modern-day monotony in area director Joe Kramer's 20th Century Boy.

When filmmaker Isaac Williams inquired about how to go about screening his horror film, The Mind, the response he received was that it takes careful planning and a lot of money.

"I have a lot of time to plan," says Williams, "and not a lot of money."

But by tag teaming with 941 Theater, Williams and two other local filmmakers will get the chance to screen their movies on a large scale. "None of us delude ourselves that thousands of people are going to see these movies," says Williams. "But it lends a certain legitimacy."

The informal night of premières begins with Joe Kramer's 20th Century Boy, about a man who claims to be a soldier from WWI who mysteriously shows up in the present. Kramer made it through two weeks at UArts before defecting for a job at TLA Video, which he calls a mini-film school boot camp. He initially submitted his film to 941's Backseat Film Festival, but missed the deadline. The 941ers liked it enough to ask Kramer to return.

The Scrapper, a half-hour documentary directed by artist Jonathan Olshefski, is about Joe, a man who glides around Philly on a pair of roller skates with his shopping cart searching for metal to sell to scrap yards. Olshefski was performing a screenwriting exercise at the Steak and Beer under the Somerset El stop when the gregarious Joe struck up a conversation with him. "He approached me and we just sat around and talked about hockey for a couple hours," says Olshefski. Days later, Olshefski saw Joe again, this time with roller skates and shopping cart in tow, and asked if he could document his life.

Williams' film, The Mind, rounds out the program. In this horror movie told in vignettes, six average people are mysteriously driven to exhume parts of one skeleton and slowly descend into murderous madness. Williams, who also did time with Kramer at TLA (they worked on each other's projects), first met 941 co-owner and lead film programmer Zafer lkücü when the two were undergrads at Temple.

Each filmmaker reiterates the importance of having a theater to show off their films.

"It's incredibly difficult, time consuming, expensive and painstaking to make a bad movie, let alone a good movie," says lkücü, who plans on making local screenings a recurring event. "I know these guys — they put their hearts and souls and personal relationships on the line to get these movies made. Once this happens, I think they just deserve to be seen and hopefully enjoyed."

(molly.eichel@citypaper.net)

Local Film Premieres | Sun., May 17, 6 p.m., $3-$10, 941 Theater, 941 N. Front St., 215-235-1385, 941theater.com