The 2007 Mayor's Premiere will take place on Thursday, April 26th . More information is available here.

The first 40 Alaskans registering for one of two workshops scheduled to be held in conjunction with the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) conference in Anchorage from October 10-14, 2006 will be eligible to be reimbursed $50 by AMIPA, under a grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum. Details available here.

Additionally, AMIPA has arranged with the AMIA for a "Local Track" registration option for Alaskans. Details available here.

This coming Thursday and Friday, September 21 and 22, AMIPA will partner with the Fairbanks Arts Association (FAA) to present Vintage Hollywood Cinema, a program of short films from Hollywood's silent era.

The program will include Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903), Buster Keaton's The Goat (1921), Charlie Chaplin's A Dog's Life (1918), and D. W. Griffith's The Making of a Man (1911).

All films will presented in 16mm, with a bright, crisp xenon bulb projector. The program begins at 7 PM, and admission is $5.

During the last week of June, AMIPA will be visted by Tim Kennedy, Founder and Director of the experimental Skyriver Program in the Lower Yukon village of Emmonak during the early 1970s.

The Skyriver Process uses film and video tools to enhance and strengthen the community development process within and between local communities for the purpose of influencing the decision-making processes of government. The emphasis of the Skyriver Process is on mobilizing the potential of community members to eventually act on their own behalf, instead of focusing on the expertise and skills of professional experts who attempt to assist the communities by serving as their advocates.

Kennedy will spend the week working with AMIPA staff to identify and catalog the films produced by the Skyriver Program and the village of Emmonak, which have been in our vaults since 1998. The chance to work with one of the key people responsible for a project like this, more than 30 years after the fact, is a rare one in the media archives world--so we're quite excited by the opportunity to learn more about this unique collection, which will both help us to preserve it, and place it in its proper context for future generations of Alaskans to learn from.

The public will have the opportunity to learn more about the Skyriver Process and the Lower Yukon Project in Emmonak, on Wednesday, June 28, at 1:00 PM when Kennedy will speak on Film, Video, and Social Change in Rural Alaska: Reflections on the Skyriver Process. This event will take place in the UAA/APU Consortium Library, Room 307. Please contact AMIPA at 786-4980 for more information.

Additionally, on Thursday, June 29th at 7:00 PM, Tim Kennedy and blues musician Gary "Alaska Slim" Sloan will present A Tribute to John Lee Hooker at Title Wave Books. Kennedy will present photographs from his recently published fine art book Midnight Son: A Tribute to John Lee Hooker; photographs that were taken at a John Lee Hooker gig in Anchorage on a Summer Solstice 30 years ago. Complimentary tickets will be available June 15th at the Title Wave information counter; please call Title Wave Books at 278-9283 for more information.

During early April AMIPA sponsored several screenings of the 1933 film classic "Eskimo" in both Anchorage and Fairbanks.

"Eskimo" was filmed on location in Northwestern Alaska, stars Alaska's own Ray Mala, and features some very fine camera work and remarkable subsistence sequences. Mala went on to star in a number of Hollywood films, and did some work behind the camera, as well (one surving photograph shows him on location in Santa Rosa, California, working on Alfred Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt").

The story is based on the writings of the Danish explorer and author Peter Freuchen, who was on location for the production of the film, and portrays the villainous sea captain. Freuchen, who spent his life exploring and writing about regions of the Arctic and Antarctic, died in Anchorage on September 2, 1957, while preparing for yet another polar expedition. His ashes were scattered in Thule, Greenland, one of many locations he named during his arctic travels.

The film was directed by W. S. "Woody" Van Dyke, who directed a number of on location epics prior to "Eskimo," but who is probably most well known for having directed the popular "Thin Man" films of the 1930s and 1940s. Like Freuchen, Van Dyke also appears in the film, as the RCMP captain who plays an important part during the third reel.

The Anchorage screenings took place on Sunday, April 2, at 3 PM and 7 PM, in the historic 4th Avenue Theatre. These screenings were co-sponsored by Friends of 4th Avenue Theatre. A total of approximately 800 people attended these two screenings.

In Fairbanks there were two screenings at the Alaska Public Lands Information Center, one on Friday, April 7 and another on Saturday, April 8. An additional screening, co-sponsored by the Fairbanks Arts Association took place on the evening of April 8, in the Alaska Centennial Center for the Arts Theatre. A total of approximately 150 people attended the three Fairbanks screenings, all of which were made possible by the generous support of the Alaska Humanities Forum.

No admission fee was charged for any of these events.

On Saturday, March 4, Anchorage's historic 4th Avenue Theatre held an open house during the opening of the Iditarod. AMIPA provided some vintage footage of dog mushing (on 4th Avenue and elsewhere) to project on the old movie house screen during the event. This footage consisted of selections from the Clarence Erwin Rusch collection (c. 1935), and the Steve McCutcheon collection (c. 1955).

Media Technician Michael Rosas-Walsh keeps himself busy, when he's not otherwise occupied working with AMIPA's histroic collections. Back on Friday, February 17, he curated two screenings of American avant-garde cinema in Homer, on the Kachemak Bay Campus of the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA). The first screening consisted of an overview of American avant-garde cinema during the 1960s; the second screening focused on contemporary work. Rosas-Walsh, whose background is in avant-garde film production, is also a painter, and has had two shows in Anchorage during the past year.

In January, the Municipality of Anchorage Arts Advisory Commission and the Alaska Arts and Culture Foundation granted the Anchorage International Film Festival (AIFF) $4,000 to help underwrite the activites of the Sixth Annual AIFF.

In addition AMIPA just received a $5,000 grant from the Machamer Charitable Fund through the Alaska Community Foundation.

The Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) are bringing their annual meeting to Anchorage October 10-14, 2006.

For more information on AMIA or this event, please see their website, or contact AMIPA.