Sometimes art comes from tough choices. Take Brian Rose’s documentary, “When I Last Saw Jesse.” The film, which won best Heartland Feature Documentary at this spring’s Kansas City FilmFest International,
As part of the Year of German-American Friendship, Goethe Pop Up Kansas City has been bringing German cinema to the Crossroads with their Pop Up Film Haus events – screenings
If you’re from rural America it can be easy to lose yourself in the city. But when rural Kansas-raised filmmaker Emily Railsback came to Kansas City, she found something. Earlier
Cinematic adventure, intrigue, tragedy, romance — and a bit of classic Brando to boot. You won’t find it streaming on Netflix or Hulu, at least not with the kind of
Kevin Willmott likes to make waves. Right now he’s approaching tsunami levels. Last year the noted filmmaker and professor of Film Studies at the University of Kansas made national news for wearing a bulletproof vest to his classes to protest guns being allowed on campus. Terming the policy “insane,” he says he will continue wearing the vest till the law is changed.
What do Shakespeare, Jack Palance and yak hair all have in common? Robert Fletcher, legendary set and costume designer for stage, television and movies, now living in Kansas City, transformed all three into the Klingons, those uber-galactic villains that have plagued Star Trek protagonists for decades. The story of their creation, a stranger-than-fiction account, is one of many peppered throughout Fletcher’s remarkable 75-year career.
If 12-year-old Reed Timmer had been harmed the day he used the family video camera to shoot a severe thunderstorm in his West Michigan front yard, the budding inclement weather fan might have thought twice about the perils associated with becoming an extreme storm chaser. Fortunately, young Timmer emerged unscathed from the quarter-size hail that […]
Just a four-minute walk from Kansas City’s old First National Bank at Baltimore and 10th Streets —now the home of the downtown Central Library — some of the biggest names in American entertainment once made their way to a small photography studio and a man they trusted to cast them in just the right light. Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor. Fanny Brice and a local ingénue named Billie Cassin (who’d eventually become Joan Crawford).
On a warm evening in late February, the premiere screening of “The Gospel According to Glenn North” played to a packed meeting room at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Many in the audience had come to honor North, the nationally renowned inaugural poet laureate of the 18th & Vine Historic Jazz District, but they left the event with a new appreciation for the talents of the documentary’s creator, artist Harold Smith.
The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 was one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States. Hundreds lost their lives and thousands were displaced, land and livelihoods lost, making for another component of the Great Migration, which brought people from the agrarian south to the industrialized northern regions and the opportunities of the West.
