Filmmaker Jeffrey Delano Davis leaps with excitement in front of a mural painted on Broad Street for a previous year’s Indie Film Fest (Photo by Brian Donohue. Click to enlarge.)
By BRIAN DONOHUE
The Indie Street Film Festival returns to Red Bank for the ninth year this week, lighting up screens across town with films produced in Iraq, Turkey, Los Angeles, the Midwest, Scotland and the Netherlands.
Oh, and Mechanic Street.
A teaser for the Indie Street Film festival beginning Monday.
The festival opens Monday at the Count Basie Center for the Arts Vogel Theater with the documentary “Mediha.” The film follows a teenage Yazidi girl who has recently returned from ISIS captivity, as she turns her camera on herself to process her trauma while rescuers search for her missing family members. Organizers say Mediha herself and director Hasan Oswald will appear “for what we can only imagine will be a powerful talkback with the audience.”
A trailer for “Mediha” which opens the Indie Street Film festival Monday night.
The festival lineup continues to crush it from there.
Now in its eighth year, the fest runs through Sunday with a full slate of documentaries, narrative, animated and short films, filmmaker question and answer sessions and parties.
A full schedule with links to ticket purchases can be found here.
Among the short films featured in a showcase of New Jersey shorts Saturday at the Count Basie Cinemas is “Digital Automatic Writing,” by Red Bank resident Jeffrey Delano Davis. 
Delano Davis had a longtime journaling practice and was using the digital painting app Procreate when he started doing stream of consciousness writing mixed with sketching and animation.
“I totally made it up,” he said of the method he dubbed digital automatic writing. “I was just trying to get my thoughts and feelings down.”
He then recorded time lapses of his sessions as he grappled with issues like a friend’s anorexia. The results is a series of short films that create a visual representation of a mind racing and grappling with the flood of thoughts, words and images that zoom through our brains constantly.
“It mimics the flow of consciousness, especially for those of us who have a lot of letters,” he said, referring to diagnoses of conditions like ADHD and OCD.
He’s hoping the film can encourage others, especially those who have not tried journaling, to pick up a tablet and try the method. He’s also excited to be in the now well-established hometown film festival. Delano Davis recounted a moment at the opening reception when one of the festival organizers asked him where he was from.
“They told me they loved my movie and said, “where are you from? I said, ‘Mechanic Street. He said, “really? That’s amazing you got into the festival. They had no idea.”
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