Ithaca College

“Make Open Space,” the second of three social media contests to be rolled out by the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival 2009–10, is seeking entries.

Judged by three prominent, international experts, “Make Open Space” will award $500 to the top project in each contest, with additional awards of $100 for two honorable mentions.

In submitting entries to “Make Open Space,” contestants are invited to remix the 2010 FLEFF artwork into a short trailer that explores open space, the program stream of FLEFF 2009–10. The submission deadline is July 31. Submission is free, but entrants are required to register online. The registration form, along with detailed submission instructions, is available at https://www.ithaca.edu/fleff/make/.

Judges of “Make Open Space” are film festival curator Georgekutty A. L. (India), new media artist Stephanie Rothenberg (USA) and Kino International publicist Rodrigo Brandão (Brazil/USA). The first social media contest, “Define Open Space,” began on May 17 with a submission deadline of July 17. Anyone interested in entering that contest may submit one image and one sentence to the collaborative Open Space Dictionary. For detailed information on registering and submitting, visit www.ithaca.edu/fleff10/define.

The third contest, “Compose Open Space,” will be rolled out June 15.

Rodrigo Brandão is the director of publicity at Kino International, a distributor of international art films. In “Latin American Spaces” — one of FLEFF’s 13 blogs available at www.ithaca.edu/fleff/openspaceblogs — Brandão profiles and discusses works by select artists who are producing challenging and politically progressive pieces, with a focus on film, politics, installation art, the internet and new/digital media. While a student at Ithaca College in the 1990s, he majored in cinema and photography and art history. He blogs for FLEFF at www.ithaca.edu/fleff10/blogs/latin_american_spaces.

Georgekutty A. L. is the founder and editor of “Deep Focus Film Quarterly” and the secretary of the Bangalore Film Society. As the founder and director of “Voices from the Waters,” an international traveling film festival, he coordinates numerous film festivals, including the Breakthrough Tricontinental Film Festival and the Human Rights in Frames in Bangalore. In 2004, he served on the selection committee of the Mumbai International Film Festival for documentary, short and animation films for the international competition. He blogs for FLEFF at www.ithaca.edu/fleff10/blogs/south_asian_spaces.

Stephanie Rothenberg is a new media artist working at the intersection of art and technology. Merging performance, installation and networked media, her work questions the boundaries and social constructs of manufactured desires. She has lectured and exhibited at numerous venues, including the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, New York City’s 2007 ConFlux Festival, the 2004 Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts in Helsinki and Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Art. Her recent awards include the 2007 Eyebeam Atelier artist in residence in New York City and the SUNY Buffalo 2020 Scholars Award.

FLEFF 2009–10 began in September 2009 and will continue through August 2010. To keep current with the blogs, screenings, readings and user-generated events, visit www.ithaca.edu/fleff.

Major funding for FLEFF Open Spaces 2009–10 has been provided by Ithaca College’s Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies and the Park Foundation.

Launched in 1997, the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival was an outreach project from the Center for the Environment at Cornell University. In 2005 the festival moved permanently to Ithaca College, where it is housed in the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies as a program to link intellectual inquiry and debate to larger global issues.