HONESDALE, PA — “Canaltown, in the general sense, is a project we have here in Honesdale… involved in connecting people to the local landscape,” says Derek Williams, “flow facilitator” with the community-building organization. “The ways we’ve been doing that lately have been through movie events, food events and mapping… [We have] a general mission to seek out things that are happening, create some new things… and connect the dots between people, places, ideas and creations.” The latest expression of this mission will be the Moving Movie Festival scheduled for May 19, where filmgoers can explore different venues throughout downtown Honesdale to see lineups of short films with a focus on local talent.

Williams, along with “strategist and implementarian” Alicia Anderson, formulated the new festival from the longstanding success of Canaltown’s own Short Spooky Movie Festival (“Spookyfest”), which has haunted Honesdale’s Octobers since 2014. “Over the years, we’ve gotten to the point that it’s reached capacity,” Williams says. “We’ve been selling out the past couple. It’s awesome, but we don’t really want to make it too much bigger, or move it out of the downtown, because that’s an important connection for us... And we thought, ‘Hey, if we can’t really grow that to what it could potentially grow to, let’s make another festival that’s [at the] polar opposite of the calendar year, and grow things that way.’ That’s why we started this one from the get-go, with a multi-venue kind of arrangement… it’s built to expand into whatever it wants to become.”

Theme is an important aspect of that expansion—the Moving Movie Festival is accepting films from a variety of genres. The films to be shown—which will be chosen from what already, at the time of this writing, amounts to four dozen submissions—will all be 15 minutes or less. This is a departure from Spookyfest, which limits the length of its entries to seven minutes.

“That’s coming right from local filmmakers we’ve been working with,” says Williams. “Some of them say, ‘Hey, this is awesome, but I’m not really a spooky movie person, and it’s kind of hard for me to come up with a movie.’ And then some also say, ‘Hey, this is awesome, but it’s really difficult to get below the seven-minute mark’—so we thought opening up the theme and giving more room to make a movie longer would help things out there.” The venues that Williams is looking at to host the festival—including Loose Leaf Pages, Here and Now Brewing Company, and REMAX Wayne—will each host specific 45-minute sets of films that repeat at the top of each hour, giving patrons an opportunity to set their own schedules and explore the town as they please; they’ll even be able to vote for their favorite films, followed by an awards ceremony and dance party at Basin & Main. Although Williams says that Honesdale’s cinematic voice is still developing—making overarching themes difficult to pin down—he uses the word “playful” to describe its current state.

Williams is excited by the potential of the new festival and Canaltown’s future endeavors—and how these events can transform the general ambience of the town: “I’ve been calling it the philosophy of a festival town, where the lines between each event going on in town are blurred. So the festival grounds, if you will, [are] like going to a Bonnaroo [Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, TN] or any type of festival, really—[they] become the town itself. If that happens, the stakeholders increase, you have all these businesses [that] can contribute and be a part of it with what they’re selling on a day-to-day basis… Ideally, you can sustainably create this festival within the town environment, and going to a town feels fun, like you’re going to a festival—and going to the festival feels like you’re in a town.”

The first annual Moving Movie Festival will be held throughout Honesdale on May 19 from 5 to 10 p.m., with tickets on sale soon; the deadline for film submissions is April 28. For more information about this and other Canaltown events, visit www.canaltown552.com.