By Beverly Blake, Knight Foundation Program Director/Macon

Eight years ago, a group of creative folks here in Macon came up with the idea for a film festival to celebrate the craft of the moving image and introduce independent films that rarely appear in Macon and the Macon Film Festival was born. Beginning in 2008, Knight supported this vision, and the 8th annual Macon Film Festival will be held February 14-17 at various historic venues in downtown Macon.  This year we’ll have the Audience Choice Awards, which will give the moviegoers a voice.  That will be fun and of course I plan on voting for “Dancing with Trees,” our own Dennis Scholl’s film.

But this is much more than a film festival.  The Macon Film Festival is where creativity meets community. Over the past seven years, the Festival has brought scores of volunteers together, introduced long time Maconites to a historic downtown they never knew they had and boosted the revenues of restaurants, hotels and services. The Festival is breathing new life into downtown Macon and showing everyone why Macon is a great place to be a part of a creative community. Importantly, the Festival has launched the Macon Film Commission, and our city is increasingly being considered for film production because of our beautiful historic buildings and temperate climate (well, except for July and August).  Because of the Macon Film Festival we have a great opportunity to enhance economic development here through feature film production to help build a Hip, Historic and Prosperous community. Please join us (and vote for Dennis’ film)!