FEATURED EVENTS

The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival is an annual video contest in which young filmmakers create weird short movies that tell the entire stories of Newbery-winning books in about 90 seconds. (Ever since 1922, the Newbery Medal has been recognized as the most prestigious award in children’s literature.) The festival shows the best movies received at special-event screenings in New York City, Chicago, San Antonio, Boston, Tacoma, and other cities, including ROCHESTER! This year, the festival will be co-hosted by festival founder James Kennedy (author of the YA fantasy The Order of Odd-Fish and more) along with Bruce Coville, Author of DOZENS of books, including the Sixth Grade Alien series! The movies are ingenious, hilarious, and impressive—from musicals to stop-motion Claymation, from puppet shows to animation! This is a great activity for families, including parents and grandparents!

James will talk about his new horror novel for adults, Bride of the Tornado, which The Guardian praised as "a powerfully weird, original tale that combines American folk horror with a surreal coming-of-age nightmare," and his sci-fi thriller Dare to Know, hailed by iconic sci-fi author Cory Doctorow as "a voraciously readable page-turner of a novel, part creepypasta, part thought-experiment.” He will also talk about his YA fantasy The Order of Odd-Fish, a cult favorite that Booklist lauded as "hilarious." There will be dramatic readings, a tornado trivia contest, weird singing, and James may even give a sneak peek to the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival (which he hosts at the Eastman Museum on April 20). James will be doing a book signing following the program, with copies of his books available for purchase.

Set against the backdrop of the filmmaker’s quixotic quest to build an ark in a field in Maine, the film heads far afield – to salt mines in the Alps, fjords in the Arctic, and ancient libraries in the Sahara – to illuminate the strange world of archives, record-keeping, and memory. Playfully weaving stop-motion animation, spellbinding cinematography, and fascinating interviews from the director’s inner circle and experts in the field of science, culture and art – including documentarians Werner Herzog and Kirsten Johnson – Ian Cheney’s The Arc of Oblivion reveals how nature inspires the human drive behind filmmaking.