For 40 years the Thomas Edison Film Festival (formerly known as the Thomas Edison Black Maria Film festival) has been advancing the unique creativity and power of the short form. The Festival was founded in 1981 and was originally named for Thomas Edison’s West Orange, NJ, film studio, whose resemblance to the familiar black-box shaped police paddy wagons sparked the nickname “black maria.”
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Festival’s relationship to Thomas Edison’s invention of the motion camera and the kinetoscope and his experimentation with the short film is at the core of the Festival. Thomas Edison Film Festival is an international juried competition celebrating all genres and independent filmmakers across the globe. Thomas Edison Film Festival is not a conventional destination film festival, or a single city festival, or a gala driven event. It is a socially conscious, modern, fiercely independent traveling festival for shorts, reaching out to diverse audiences with provocative, timely, edgy and compelling new works by both accomplished and emerging filmmakers. The Thomas Edison Film Festival welcomes all genres including narrative, experimental, animation, documentary, and hybrids. We celebrate films which address the environment, race and class, immigration, the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities and issues of social justice. Short films are celebrated in their own right - not as a sidebar to feature length films. The films we celebrate are artistic, empathetic and engaging works which simultaneously teach and entertain. The Thomas Edison Film Festival receives generous support from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts; the Charles Edison Fund – Edison Innovation Foundation; the Hudson County Office of Cultural and Heritage Affairs and Tourism; Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University; the Hoboken Historical Museum; Big Sky Edit; WithumSmith+Brown; Lowenstein Sandler, LLP; the NBA; Monster Remotes; Syracuse University; Fairleigh Dickinson University; Adobe Systems, Inc.; and Microsoft through TechSoup.org. To learn more about the Thomas Edison Film Festival and Thomas A. Edison Media Arts Consortium, visit blackmariafilmfestival.org.
