Our annual fiction issue is coming in October and we are reading submissions from Bloomington writers. This year’s fiction issue will have a Halloween theme. Send your best spooky short story to ed****@th******.com. Please put Fiction Submission in the subject line.

“Short” in this case means up to 5,000 words. Although we readily acknowledge that “we can be talked into almost anything,” in this case word length is not negotiable. The 5,001st word will not be considered, no matter how thrilling it might be.

Format: double-spaced in Word.

We look forward to reading your work!

You can watch Gunda right here, right now (FINAL NIGHT! JULY 15)

Experiential cinema in its purest form, Gunda chronicles the unfiltered lives of a mother pig (whom the film is named after), a flock of chickens, and a herd of cows with masterful intimacy. Gunda is a labor of love by Russian director Victor Kossakovsky Using stark, transcendent black and white cinematography and the farm’s ambient soundtrack, director Kossakovsky invites the audience to slow down and experience life as his subjects do, taking in their world with a magical patience and an other worldly perspective. Gunda asks us to meditate on the mystery of animal consciousness, and reckon with the role humanity plays in it. (Kossakovsky jokes that he discovered Gunda on a Norwegian farm, on what he refers to as “the first day of casting.”)  93 min

Gunda ― which doubles as the name of the movie and the name of the pig ― is as close as we may ever come to experiencing the world as animals do, specifically the animals that become our food. –Boston Globe

SPELLBINDING, SUBLIMELY BEAUTIFUL and PROFOUNDLY MOVING, Gunda offers you the opportunity to look — at animals, yes, but also at qualities that are often subordinated in narratively driven movies, at textures, shapes and light. These images testify that to see, really see, through the eyes of others, four-legged or otherwise, is to be fully human. CRITIC’S PICK! –The New York Times

Our July issue is on the virtual newsstands. Here is your hand-delivered copy. There’s some good stuff in this month’s issue including:

Where Do We Go When We Die?

The ongoing Covid-19 catastrophe has tasked us to confront mortality on a daily basis. By Pennfield Jensen

Friday Night at Dinky’s

Dinky’s is the name and auction is the game at this Amish-owned-and-operated institution in Daviess County. The auctions take place inside two of the biggest barns you might ever see and attract hundreds of bargain-seekers from far and wide. By Mason Cassady

Middle Way House: Candid Conversations 

We are running a series of interviews with Middle Way members in recognition of the domestic violence shelter’s 50^th Anniversary. This month features conversations with Penny Gaither and Cindy Houston. “I lived in fear,” Penny says about her life before joining Middle Way. Cindy Houston’s dream is that one day we can “close the shelter, because nobody needs it.” Interviews by Robert F. Arnove

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We hope to resume weekly, in-person film screenings in August when campus re-opens (assuming there are no surprises). We may also resume the print edition of the magazine. Let’s all cross our fingers and keep them crossed.

In the meantime, please keep the Film Series and The Ryder magazine going and consider making a donation

ou can watch this film right here, right now

This illuminating documentary explores the life of a unique American artist, a man with a remarkable and unlikely biography. Bill Traylor was born into slavery in 1853 on a cotton plantation in rural Alabama. After the Civil War, Traylor continued to farm the land as a sharecropper until the late 1920s. Aging and alone, he moved to Montgomery and worked odd jobs in the thriving segregated black neighborhood. A decade later, in his late 80s, Traylor became homeless and started to draw and paint, both memories from plantation days and scenes of a radically changing urban culture. Having witnessed profound social and political change during a life spanning slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and the Great Migration, Traylor devised his own visual language to translate an oral culture into something original, powerful, and culturally rooted. He made well over a thousand drawings and paintings between 1939-1942. This colorful, strikingly modernist work eventually led him to be recognized as one of America’s greatest self-taught artists and the subject of a Smithsonian retrospective. Using historical and cultural context, Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts brings the spirit and mystery of Traylor’s incomparable art to life. Making dramatic and surprising use of tap dance and evocative period music, the film balances archival photographs and footage, insightful perspectives from his descendents, and Traylor’s striking drawings and paintings to reveal one of America’s most prominent artists to a wide audience. CRITIC’S PICK! –The New York Times “An extraordinary artist…Traylor’s pictures stamp themselves on your eye and mind… (nothing) impaired the humor and subtlety of his imagination. Traylor’s art generates a presence at once mighty and fugitive, forever just around the corner of being understood.”  – Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker

No one in the world makes films that look like those of Swedish master absurdist Roy Andersson: intricately designed, photographed, and lit. His dreamlike movies are acclaimed for their deadpan comic timing and the visual inspiration of artists like Otto Dix and Edward Hopper.  Some of you saw his film A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE when we showed it in 2015, but just in case you missed it, we are showing it again, along with his new film, ABOUT ENDLESSNESS.

ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (Best Director prize-winner at the Venice Film Festival), opens with a breathtaking shot, inspired by Marc Chagall, of two lovers hovering in the clouds. What follows is pure Andersson, a succession of precisely realized, blackly comic vignettes on the complexities of human nature: a priest loses his faith after recurring nightmares detailing his own crucifixion; a father stops to tie his daughter’s shoelaces in the rain; a man obsesses over a brush-off from an old classmate (“I can’t believe Svenker Olsson got a PhD. It’s really quite annoying”); a couple contentedly sips champagne to the sounds of Billie Holiday; a dentist walks out on a wailing patient and into a bar, downing a drink as snow majestically falls outside; and that couple floats over a war-ravaged Cologne. Addressing the vexing qualities of existence, Andersson mixes the challenges of everyday life with the flashes of beauty and grace we take for granted.

SWEDEN / GERMANY / NORWAY       76 MIN       IN SWEDISH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES

Another masterpiece of the human condition, ranging from the evils of war to the redemptive power of love…WHAT AN AMAZING EXPERIENCE THIS FILM IS. Andersson’s films are endlessly rewatchable. To view them is to abolish gravity. – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

We hope to resume weekly, in-person film screenings in August when campus re-opens (assuming there are no surprises). Let’s all cross our fingers and keep them crossed.

In the meantime, please keep the Film Series and The Ryder magazine going and consider making a donation

You can watch Stray in our virtual theater right here, right now

Woof Woof! Stray explores what it means to live as a being without status or security, following three stray dogs, residents of Istanbul, as they embark on inconspicuous journeys through Turkish society. Zeytin, fiercely independent, embarks on adventures through the city at night; Nazar, nurturing and protective, easily befriends the humans around her; while Kartal, a shy puppy living on the outskirts of a construction site, finds companions in the security guards who care for her. The strays’ disparate lives intersect when they each form intimate bonds with a group of young Syrians with whom they share the streets. (72 mn) An interview with filmmaker Elizabeth Lo will follow the film.

CRITIC’S PICK! Stray builds a subtle, cross-species commentary that’s more than a little melancholy. While never directly political, Lo’s camera is there when the animals encounter a women’s march for equality and, later, when the refugees connect with boatmen who share their own migrant past. The filmmaker’s eyes may rarely leave the dogs, but what she’s really looking at is us. -The New York Times

We hope to resume weekly, in-person film screenings in August when campus re-opens (assuming there are no surprises). Let’s all cross our fingers and keep them crossed.

In the meantime, please keep the Film Series and The Ryder magazine going and consider making a donation

The Academy Awards are Sunday night. If you haven’t watched the Oscar Shorts yet this might be a good time. Here’s the link. And if you have already watched them, you might consider gifting the Shorts to your favorite cinephile. Simply click on the Watch Now button. You’ll find a “Give as a Gift” option just below the Unlock button. The Oscar Shorts are a gift that will be fondly remembered for a long time, or at least until Sunday night.

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• Rudy Pozzatti (1925-2021): Rudy Pozzatti embodied the ideal of the artist-teacher. During his lengthy tenure as a distinguished professor at Indiana University, he helped to build the printmaking department into one the best in the country. By Nanette Esseck Brewer

• Middle Way House Turns 50: “Living in a shelter is tough,” Executive Director Debra Morrow explains. “It’s not your home. The longer people sit in shelter, the harder it is for them to reclaim their lives. “ By Robert F. Arnove

• The Lilly Library from A to Z: From James Bond’s cigars to locks of Edgar Allen Poe’s hair, the Lilly Library boasts an amazing collection of curiosities.  And they are all in Darlene J. Sadlier’s book, The Lilly Library from A to Z.  By Noah Sandweiss

• What We Talk About When We Talk About Appalachia: Three films–Hillbilly, Nomadland and Hillbilly Elegy–take on working class white identity in Appalachia.

• Die Pest: In pandemic times, we search out pandemic tales. Otto Rippert’s silent 1919 film, Die Pest in Florenz (The Plague in Florenz) is a plague film for a plague year.

• This Old House: Jawshing Arthur Liou’s multichannel video work at the Eskenazai Museum of Art, House of the Singing Winds, embraces high resolution video. But art is directly tied to economics and politics. Money and influence have a particularly unique relationship with the film/video artforms due to high equipment costs, studios, “the industry” and many other components. “IU has many T.C. Steele paintings in its collection,” Liou says. “I’m bringing the whole house.” By Ian Carstens

This issue of The Ryder is funded in part by a Recover Forward grant from the Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association. The grant covers some of our expenses, but not all.
As you flip through this issue of the magazine (85 pages this month!), if you should see a story that you like, or if you would just want to support local, independent journalism, please consider making a donation.

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Also in our Virtual Theater: BILL TRAYLOR CHASING GHOSTS

Bill Traylor was born into slavery in 1853 on a cotton plantation in rural Alabama. After the Civil War, Traylor continued to farm the land as a sharecropper until the late 1920s. Aging and alone, he moved to Montgomery and worked odd jobs in the thriving segregated black neighborhood. A decade later, in his late 80s, Traylor became homeless and started to draw and paint, visualizing memories from plantation days and scenes of a radically changing urban culture. Having witnessed profound social and political change during a life spanning slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and the Great Migration, Traylor devised his own visual language to translate an oral culture into something original, powerful, and culturally rooted. He made well over a thousand drawings and paintings between 1939-1942. This colorful, strikingly modernist work eventually led him to be recognized as one of America’s greatest self-taught artists and the subject of a Smithsonian retrospective. Using historical and cultural context, Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts brings the spirit and mystery of Traylor’s incomparable art to life. Making dramatic and surprising use of tap dance and evocative period music, the film balances archival photographs and footage, insightful perspectives from his descendants, and Traylor’s striking drawings and paintings to reveal one of America’s most prominent artists to a wide audience.

What’s inside the new issue of The Ryder magazine? See for yourself: here’s your personal copy. And here is a snapshot of what you’ll find…

• Rudy Pozzatti (1925-2021): Rudy Pozzatti embodied the ideal of the artist-teacher. During his lengthy tenure as a distinguished professor at Indiana University, he helped to build the printmaking department into one the best in the country.

• Middle Way House Turns 50: “Living in a shelter is tough,” Executive Director Debra Morrow explains. “It’s not your home. The longer people sit in shelter, the harder it is for them to reclaim their lives. “

• The Lilly Library from A to Z: From James Bond’s cigars to locks of Edgar Allen Poe’s hair, the Lilly Library boasts an amazing collection of curiosities.  And they are all in Darlene J. Sadlier’s book, The Lilly Library from A to Z. 

• What We Talk About When We Talk About Appalachia: Three films–Hillbilly, Nomadland and Hillbilly Elegy–take on working class white identity in Appalachia.

• Die Pest: In pandemic times, we search out pandemic tales. Otto Rippert’s silent 1919 film, Die Pest in Florenz (The Plague in Florenz) is a plague film for a plague year.

• This Old House: Jawshing Arthur Liou’s multichannel video work at the Eskenazai Museum of Art, House of the Singing Winds, embraces high resolution video. But art is directly tied to economics and politics. Money and influence have a particularly unique relationship with the film/video artforms due to high equipment costs, studios, “the industry” and many other components. “IU has many T.C. Steele paintings in its collection,” Liou says. “I’m bringing the whole house.”

This issue of The Ryder is funded in part by a Recover Forward grant from the Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association. The grant covers some of our expenses, but not all.
As you flip through this issue of the magazine (85 pages this month!), if you should see a story that you like, or if you would just want to support local, independent journalism, please consider making a donation.

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The Oscar Shorts

The Academy Awards are Sunday night. If you haven’t watched the Oscar Shorts yet this might be a good time. Here’s the link. And if you have already watched them, you might consider gifting the Shorts to your favorite cinephile. The Oscar Shorts are a gift that will be fondly remembered for a long time, or at least until Sunday night.

---

Also in our Virtual Theater: BILL TRAYLOR CHASING GHOSTS

Bill Traylor was born into slavery in 1853 on a cotton plantation in rural Alabama. After the Civil War, Traylor continued to farm the land as a sharecropper until the late 1920s. Aging and alone, he moved to Montgomery and worked odd jobs in the thriving segregated black neighborhood. A decade later, in his late 80s, Traylor became homeless and started to draw and paint, visualizing memories from plantation days and scenes of a radically changing urban culture. Having witnessed profound social and political change during a life spanning slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and the Great Migration, Traylor devised his own visual language to translate an oral culture into something original, powerful, and culturally rooted. He made well over a thousand drawings and paintings between 1939-1942. This colorful, strikingly modernist work eventually led him to be recognized as one of America’s greatest self-taught artists and the subject of a Smithsonian retrospective. Using historical and cultural context, Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts brings the spirit and mystery of Traylor’s incomparable art to life. Making dramatic and surprising use of tap dance and evocative period music, the film balances archival photographs and footage, insightful perspectives from his descendants, and Traylor’s striking drawings and paintings to reveal one of America’s most prominent artists to a wide audience.

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May 20, 21 and 22 at 7:30 at the IU Radio & Television Theater • Purchase Tickets
Iconic, elegant, and populist all at once: the Automat (aka Horn & Hardart) revolutionized American dining a century ago, long before there were fast food restaurants or hipster coffee shops. Patrons inserted nickels into slots, and slices of lemon meringue pie, mac & cheese, baked beans, and creamed spinach magically appeared from a grid of gleaming chrome windows. Then there was the eatery’s signature 5-cent coffee, cascading from ornate dolphin-headed spouts. To describe the clientele as eclectic would be an understatement. Everyone ate there–young and old, rich and poor, famous (Audrey Hepburn, pictured above) and infamous (Allen Ginsberg). Mel Brooks (who sings an homage he wrote specifically for the film), Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Colin Powell, Carl Reiner, and others pay effusive tribute to this communal Art Deco home away from home. Says Brooks: “You didn’t need a lot of money. You needed a lot of nickels.” Debut filmmaker Lisa Hurwitz collages rare artifacts, images, and memorabilia (including personal photos and deeply affectionate stories from former employees and the founding family) to create a love letter to pie and nickel coffee. (79 min)

CRITIC’S PICK! Sweet and shaggy. An engrossing tale of cultural harmony. Plunges us… into states of delight and visceral lament. Rapturous accounts of the women who changed dollars into nickels… Brooks goes gaga at the thought of the Automat’s coconut custard. FEELS LIKE THE KEY TO SOME LOCK ON THE AMERICAN SOUL. – Wesley Morris, The New York Times

I LOVED THE AUTOMAT. It is something special: a mixture of fragrant recollections and astute social history. What’s surprising in the extreme is how moving the film can be in evoking those places of welcome during an era of American optimism. – Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal

You can watch The Oscar Shorts right here, right now!

The Oscar Shorts offer a vision of what the Academy Awards should and could be but very rarely are: eclectic, cosmopolitan, scrappy and surprising.
-A.O. Scott, The New York Times

One of the most entertaining categories at the Academy Awards — and one of the least heralded — is for the Best Short Subject. We are featuring the nominees for Best Short Animated, Live-Action and Documentary Film. Below are brief descriptions of each nominee.

The Oscar Shorts open on Friday, April 2nd and will stay on our calendar through April 30th. This is your chance to see all 15 nominated films before the awards ceremony on April 25th.

Tickets: Each program is $12. You can bundle all three into one package for $30. As with all of the films we have been screening for the past year in our virtual theater, 50% of the proceeds will eventually make their way back to us and help keep us going during the pandemic.

All films are unrated; the ratings included here are, basically, our best guess for what they would be rated. You know your kids better than we do. That said, parents should feel free to email us (ed****@th******.com) with questions about the appropriateness of films for younger viewers and children should feel free to email us if they feel their parents have become hopelessly out of touch with the contemporary world.

You will find a link right here on April 2nd to begin watching the Oscar Shorts.

ANIMATED SHORT FILMS, approximately 92 minutesNinety-six films qualified for Best Animated Short. This category includes the five nominees along with three bonus films that were shortlisted for a nomination, but came up short. (Rated PG-13)

BURROW, Madeline Sharafian and Michael Capbarat, USA, 6 minutes.
A young rabbit tries to build the burrow of her dreams, becoming embarrassed each time she accidentally digs into a neighbor’s home.

GENIUS LOCI, Adrien Merigeau and Amaury Ovise, France, 16 minutes.
One night, Reine, a young loner, sees among the urban chaos a moving oneness that seems alive, like some sort of guide. (This film features adult language.)

IF ANYTHING HAPPENS I LOVE YOU, Will McCormack and Michael Govier, USA, 12 minutes.
Grieving parents struggle with the loss of their daughter after a school shooting. An elegy on grief. (Might not be suitable for children 12 and under)

OPERA, Erick Oh, South Korea/USA, 9 minutes.A stunning, multi-layered pyramidal tour portrait of the cycles, foibles, and wonder of humanity, filled with beauty and absurdity.

YES-PEOPLE, Gisli Darri Halldorsson and Arnar Gunnarson, Iceland, 8 minutes.
One morning an eclectic mix of people face the everyday battle, such as work, school and dish-washing. As the day progresses, their relationships are tested and ultimately their capacity to cope.

Bonus Films:

THE SNAIL AND THE WHALE, Max Lang and Daniel Snaddon UK/Germany, 26 minutes.
The heartwarming story of a snail who lives on a rock and wants to see the world so gets a lift from a huge humpback whale. Based on the picture book written by the creators of the lovable Gruffalo, Julia Donaldson and illustrator Axel Scheffler. Character voices are lovingly provided by stars Diana Riggs, Sally Hawkins, David Cumming and Rob Brydon.

KAPAEMAHU, Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson, USA, 7 minutes.
Long ago, four extraordinary individuals of dual male and female spirit brought the healing arts from Tahiti to Hawaii. Beloved by the people for their gentle ways and miraculous cures, they imbued four giant boulders with their powers. The stones still stand on what is now Waikiki Beach, but the true story behind them has been hidden – until now. Narrated in an ancient Hawaiian dialect, Kapaemahu brings this powerful legend back to life in vivid animation, seen through the eyes of a curious child.

TO: GERARD, Taylor Meacham, USA, 8 minutes.
A sprightly elderly man, through a little magic, gives a child the ability to dream of possibilities. First shown at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France, the retro feel of this story is perfectly set by the French influenced, European styles of animation.

LIVE ACTION SHORT FILMS, approximately 124 minutes
One hundred seventy-four films qualified in the category, these are the nominees. (Rated R, Adult Themes and Language)

FEELING THROUGH, Dough Roland and Susan Ruzenski, 19 minutes.
A late-night encounter on a New York City street leads to a profound connection between a teen in need and a man who is DeafBlind.

THE LETTER ROOM, Elvira Lind and Sofia Sondervan, 30 minutes.
When a corrections officer is transferred to the letter room, he soon finds himself enmeshed in a prisoner’s deeply private life.

THE PRESENT, Farah Nabulsi, 25 minutes.
On his wedding anniversary, Yusef and his young daughter set out in the West Bank to buy his wife a gift. Between soldiers, segregated roads and checkpoints, how easy would it be to go shopping?

TWO DISTANT STRANGERS,  Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe, 29 minutes.
Cartoonist Carter James’ repeated attempts to get home to his dog are thwarted by a recurring deadly encounter that forces him to relive the same awful day over.

WHITE EYE, Tomer Shushan and Shira Hohcman, 21 minutes.
A man finds his stolen bicycle, which now belongs to a stranger. While attempting to retrieve it, he struggles to remain human.

DOCUMENTARY SHORT FILMS, approximately 135 minutesOne hundred fourteen films qualified in the category, these are the nominees. (Rated R

A CONCERTO IS A CONVERSATION, Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers, 13 minutes.
A virtuoso jazz pianist and film composer tracks his family’s lineage through his 91-year-old grandfather from Jim Crow Florida to the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

A LOVE SONG FOR LATASHA, Sophia Nahli Allison and Janice Duncan, 19 minutes.
An evocative exploreation of 15-year-old Latasha Harlin’s life and dreams. subsequent to her death in 1992.

COLETTE, Anthony Giacchino and Alice Doyard, 25 minutes.
Former French Resistance member Colette Marin-Catherine refused to step foot in Germany for 74 years. This changes when a young history student named Lucie enters her life and convinces her to visit the concentration camp where the Nazis killed her brother.

DO NOT SPLIT, Anders Hammer and Charlotte Cook, 35 minutes.
In 2019 a proposed bill allowing the Chinese government to extradite criminal suspects to mainland China escalated protests throughout Hong Kong. DO NOT SPLIT captures the determination and sacrifices of the protesters, the government’s backlash, and the passage of the new Beijing-backed national security law.

HUNGER WARD, Skye Fitzgerald and Michael Scheuerman, 40 minutes.
Filmed from inside two of the most active therapeutic feeding centers in Yemen, HUNGER WARD documents two female health care workers fighting to thwart the spread of starvation against the backdrop of a forgotten war. The film provides an unflinching portrait of Dr. Aida Alsadeeq and Nurse Mekkia Mahdi as they try to save the lives of hunger-stricken children within a population on the brink of famine.