Arts & Entertainment

Big Screen St. Louis

By Paul Friswold 

Cinephilia and homer-eroticism come together this week, as the seventh annual St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase fires up the projector Saturday and then continues through Thursday (July 21 through 26). Offering a mix of features and shorts for your delight and delectation, this year’s showcase officially gets under way at the Centene Center for Arts and Education (3547 Olive Street) at 11 a.m. Saturday, with a series of seminars and Q&A’s with noted filmmakers, including directors AJ Schnack and George Hickenlooper and screenwriter/novelist Scott Phillips; admission is free, but reservations are requested (call 314-289-4150 or visit www.cinemastlouis.org). At 7 p.m., This is Lo-Fi Saint Louis, a selection of shorts from Bill Streeter’s video blogging site, kicks off the filmic portion of this week’s odyssey. Tickets for This is Lo-Fi Saint Louis, and for all other screenings, are $8 to $10. Lo-Fi is the only screening at the Centene building; beginning Sunday at noon, all other programs are at the Tivoli Theatre (6350 Delmar Boulevard, University City). Highlights of this year’s showcase are plentiful, and include: Sunday’s screening of Kurt Cobain: About a Son, AJ Schnack’s elegiac and haunting documentary about Cobain; Ghost Image on Monday, a psychological thriller starring Elizabeth Rohm; Chris King’s Blind Cat Black, a silent film set to a musical performance of Ece Ayhan’s poem of the same name and starring a cavalcade of familiar St. Louis faces brightens up you Tuesday; And the sublimely wacky YouTube sensation “Eagles Fly” (part of Wednesday’s Shorts Program: Documentary 4). The Thursday event is the SLFS Awards Party from 8 to midnight at Blueberry Hill (6504 Delmar Boulevard, University City), where admission is free, donations are welcome and awards are given to the best of the bunch.