What: Bicentennial Film Festival
When: May 20 and 21
Where: Cornerstone Center For the Arts on May 20 and the Heorot on May 21
This event is free.
Nine filmmakers will feature their work this weekend to celebrate Indiana's bicentennial, showing different facets of Indiana history.
The Delaware County Historical Society (DCHS) is hosting a two-day film festival to celebrate the anniversary.
The free event will feature nine films and take place at 6:30 p.m. May 20th at Cornerstone Center for the Arts and 4:30 p.m. May 21st on the second floor of the Heorot in downtown Muncie.
The idea for the festival came from Nancy Carlson, a telecommunications professor emerita at Ball State. Two of her films that have previously aired on WIPB will be screened at the festival.
“The 200th bicentennial of the state of Indiana is all about history, so I thought that the films that I have done were each components of Indiana’s history,” Carlson said.
"Ed Ball’s Century" premiered in January 2000 and is a biopic of his life. He was the son of Edmund B. Ball, one of the founding five Ball Brothers.
Ed Ball was born in 1905 and died in 2000, allowing him to live in all ten decades of the 20th century. He passed away eight months after the film’s premiere.
The film tells the history of his parents, who settled in Muncie and built glass factories, and details Ed’s life and the several years he spent running Ball Corporation in Muncie.
The movie contains interviews with Ed in his office at the Ball Brothers Foundation, in his home (which is now the Ball Honors House) and his vacation home in Michigan.
“That’s the beginning of what we now know as Ball jars,” Carlson said. “Ball Corporation changed from a maker of glass canning jars for homemakers to an aerospace company that actually helped fix the Hubble space telescope. The corporation changed greatly under Ed Ball’s leadership.”
During her time at Ball State, Carlson worked in the Ball Communications Building and became familiar with Ed. She knew he was important in the founding of PBS and that he helped start WIPB.
In addition to his corporate contributions, Ed helped with the beginnings of Ball Memorial Hospital, Muncie’s YMCA and Cornerstone Center for the Arts.
“He was a magnanimous benefactor of Muncie, so this film is really the life story of Ed Ball, but in a way it reflects things that happened to all of us during the 20th century,” Carlson said.
"Movers and Stakers," Carlson’s other film at the festival, tells the story of one segment of the National Road, the first interstate highway that was started before Indiana became a state. Due to funding issues, the road ended in Illinois.
Her film tells 13 stories of people and historical figures along Indiana’s portion of the National Road, which goes from Richmond to Terre Haute. It originally aired in 2009.
“I probably would be a historian if I would start all over again,” Carlson said. “I really like history, and the older I get, the more I like it. So documentary filmmaking came as a natural for me, and my very favorite part of it was the research. … It was great fun learning and talking to people along the National Road.”
Chris Flook, vice president of DCHS and a telecommunications professor at Ball State, said the whole idea of the festival is to celebrate the state. Around 40 submissions were entered.
“We narrowed it down to have a little bit of variety. … Some films are an hour, some films are like five minutes,” Flook said. “The Historical Society exists to celebrate history, and so a lot of our programming is designed for just that. … We thought if we put something like this together, we might get a different kind of crowd and sort of just say, 'This is our organization, we celebrate culture and local history. Perhaps you’d like to be a member.'”
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