You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. My name is Brian Hunter, and I'm the senior film programmer for the Cinnatopia International Film Festival.

So Cinnatopia 2016, how many years have you guys been doing the festival now?

This is our fifth year, our third year, sort of legitimately in Detroit.

Every year you're changing, evolving, just a little bit more. What kind of new things does the festival have to offer this year?

I think if you look at our venues, we usually have a symposium, and this year, unfortunately,

the symposium isn't happening. So we looked around and we thought to ourselves,

what's like a good way to sort of fill that void and have this sort of intellectual side to the festival. And so I think

that's, this year it's Leonard Malton and all this Disney stuff that we have, streams of Fantasia

and Trains of Lady of the Tramp and shorts and Bambi. So I think that's like, that's the stuff

about Sonatopia that I'm excited about right now. Very cool.

And so, yeah, Leonard Moulton coming into town, huh?

Yeah, he's actually a friend of ours through the Art House Convergence,

which is a program that runs out of the Michigan Theater that meets at Sundance over a year for a few days before the festival starts and just a bunch of art houses.

And he came a few years ago out to that, and so we asked him to come in Michigan and he accepted very quickly. I know that in

years past, you've really tried to team up with some of the other organizations that are

happening around town. Are you still doing that this year? Are you doing like outreach to the Arab American

Museum, those kind of things? Yeah, we have our screenings in the Arab Film Festival at the Arab

American Museum again this year. Screening films, like as I open my eyes, which one of my colleagues,

Gary Meyer, who is working at the festival at us, saw it at San Francisco, and just raved about it, about the Arab Spring.

You know, we also, you know, we've expanded a little more in Dearborn, too, because we're using the Henry Ford Museum and their giant screen experience.

But, yeah, we're working with the Nomday Center in Detroit to do a screen of the Sundance film The Hits.

And so we're pretty excited for that.

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