The 24th Annual Ainsworth Film Festival is being held virtually this weekend in conjunction with a film festival on the west coast. Each July, local historian Michael Zahs presents footage from the Brinton film collection and narrates the silent moving pictures to a crowd at the Ainsworth Opera House. Zahs says this Saturday, that will all be done online with the Broncho Billy and Friends Silent Film Festival out of San Francisco, California. The couple who oversees the festival saw a showing of Saving Brinton in 2018 in California before it went to South Korea, “They have a festival this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and they’re dedicating the Saturday part of the film festival to Saving Brinton. The wife of the couple said that she just felt that this was one of, she said, one of her two favorite documentaries ever. So, they’re dedicating that day for this, so our Ainsworth Film Festival will be international this year, online through this festival in San Francisco.”

The documentary Saving Brinton will be shown and then some of the silent films from the Brinton Collection. Zahs’s work to preserve and share this 130-year-old collection, which contains some of the oldest films in the world, is the subject of Saving Brinton.

Zahs shares the Ainsworth Film Festival is the longest running film festival in Iowa and he believes it is one of the smallest towns in the nation to have an on-going film festival, but with COVID-19 it isn’t possible to hold it in person, “I don’t think that people around here realize how significant the Ainsworth Film Festival is, but it really is and this year makes it even more special.”

Zahs, along with Saving Brinton filmmakers John Richard and Andrew Sherburne, will be live for a question and answer session. Click here for the digital film festival on Facebook that’ll be happening this Saturday at 5 p.m.