The southeast Iowa town of Fairfield is putting a new twist on this weekend’s First Fridays Art Walk. The Jefferson County town is also hosting a film and video festival through Sunday featuring works produced locally, nationally and internationally. Holly Moore, one of the fest’s organizers, says they’re capitalizing on the community’s many ties to Hollywood and New York.
Moore says the theme is "The Fairfield Connection" and there are two feature presentations but every offering has some sort of connection to Fairfield as a town. She says for a town Fairfield’s size, there’s a surprising number of film industry connections in the form of professional actors, filmmakers, screen writers, producers and documentary filmmakers. One feature film is "Class C" by Wally Kurth, who starred on "Days of our Lives" and "General Hospital."
Kurth’s sister lives in Fairfield. Moore says another featured film is "Greenpeace: Taking a Stand," made by award-winning film maker Leigh Badgley, a former Fairfield resident. Moore says "We have a very unusually diverse community down here and we have a sort of unusual relationship with the film industry on the East and West Coasts, and we mined those relationships to have some of our different feature films coming in." The film fest is an offshoot of the First Fridays Art Walk — held the first Friday of every month. Some 22 galleries in Fairfield feature more than 300 artists, musicians, actors, writers, poets and dancers on or around the historic town square.