Iowa City film screening ‘elevates’ stories of locals impacting community

IOWA CITY, Iowa (KCRG) – Stories of people working to make Iowa City a more sustainable and self-sufficient place were up on the big screen Sunday.

Film Scene partnered with local filmmakers and Resilient Sustainable Future Iowa City (RSFIC) to create 12 short films that will be shown at Film Scene throughout the year. Each film is about 90 seconds long and features a real person and what they’re doing to impact the community.

“We’ve got lots of people around town that are working together, but there’s no advertisements for them,” said Riley Eynon-Lynch, Executive Director of RSFIC.

“Many people kind of think of blockbusters when they think big screen, but…I think one of the things that a big screen is made for is to elevate stories that we might otherwise not see in the same way,” said Andrew Sherburne, Executive Director of Film Scene.

Eynon-Lynch said his organization was focused on becoming powerful on the local level.

“We spend, as a town, $70 million a year on Amazon.com, and then sort of fight over $1 or $2 million here or there in our own city budget,” said Eynon-Lynch. “We think we’ve outsourced a lot of our power so that people in Iowa City are often buying a solution to a problem they have or looking to the government or a company to help them…When we talk about resilience, we’re talking about learning to work together…and thinking about reclaiming sources of power to Iowa City like food and shelter and energy, and the things right now we’re dependent on folks outside of Iowa City for.”

Eynon-Lynch said these movies were a powerful demonstration of the ways in which local investment was already happening.

“We wanted to show just examples of people working together,” he said.

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