Next week, a new festival will cover Greater Columbus with the best in independent cinema.

Cinema Columbus – a film festival presented by CAPA that was first announced in 2020 but delayed for two years due to the pandemic – will offer screenings Wednesday through Sunday, May 1, at most major owned-and-operated theaters locally, including the Drexel Theater in Bexley, Gateway Film Center and Studio 35 Cinema and Drafthouse, as well as film/video at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

The films screened will run the gamut from a French-language fantasy (“Petite Maman”) to a program of female director’s shorts to a documentary about former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick (“Kaepernick & America “). The inaugural edition was largely hosted by Gateway Film Center President and CEO Chris Hamel and Drexel Theater Director Jeremy Henthorn.

The goal, said Molly Kreuzman, coordinator of Cinema Columbus, is to bring thought-provoking and eye-opening films to local audiences.

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“In many ways you can walk into a movie, you can experience a culture different from yours, you can experience a lifestyle different from yours,” Kreuzman said, adding that she wanted to focus on films that might not be easily seen elsewhere. .

“I really want to dig deeper and find films that might not have these big festival pieces,” she said.

Hometown boys make a movie

To kick off what organizers hope will be an annual festival that will attract applications from independent filmmakers around the world, Cinema Columbus will screen a new comedy-drama whose creators have strong ties to the community.

“Linoleum,” a comedy-drama with lots of sci-fi elements, starring comedian Jim Gaffigan as an Ohio children’s science show host who, in an attempt to achieve a childhood ambition, begins to work on its own creation rocket, will be screened Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Théâtre du Sud. The supporting cast includes Rhea Seehorn, Amy Hargreaves, Michael Ian Black and Tony Shalhoub.

The film, which premiered to acclaim at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas in March, was directed by Colin West, a 34-year-old Upper Arlington native now based in California.

The Ohio connection doesn’t end there: two of West’s classmates in Upper Arlington, Chadd Harbold and Chad Simpson, are among the film’s producers. Several other Ohio natives are part of the crew.

“It’s just one of those things where we all made movies when we were kids,” West said. “We would do really shitty remakes of ‘Lord of the Rings’ or ‘Indiana Jones’, just silly stuff. I think it was kind of a crash course.

Even back then, Simpson said, the trio referred to their amateur film endeavors as “training wheels” for their future careers.

“When other kids were doing popular kids’ socials on the weekends, Colin and Chadd and I would have our parents’ little cameras, or sometimes the school cameras in high school, and we would run around and make videos fun,” said Simpson, 35, who also lives in California.

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“Obviously we’re not doing anything groundbreaking, but we’re developing an ease and a language (with film).”

Each of the three eventually entered the film industry, and as they began to establish their careers, they stayed in touch.

“My personal goal (was) to make movies with my friends,” Simpson said. “Anything I can do to get back the feeling I had as a child, as an adult, I want to do that.”

The birth of ‘Linoleum’

In an effort to produce one of West’s scripts, Simpson read “Linoleum,” which West began writing in 2015.

“‘Linoleum’ continued to rise to the top as our favorite and the one we thought we could do,” Simpson said. “It took us about three or four years to put together a package, get the cast together, with funding, and get it off the ground.”

The low-budget independent film was shot over 24 days in October and November 2020 in Kingston, New York.

“This is before the vaccine and right after the quarantine phase of the pandemic, so the majority of our cast and crew hadn’t worked on anything since March of that year,” Simpson said. “Everyone had this common goal of making the movie, and it was really inspiring and energizing to come together around one thing.”

Gaffigan delivers a responsive performance that might surprise fans of his stand-up routines.

“There are some fun elements, sure, but the emotional core is what we were really focusing on in the movie,” West said. “Jim has so much reach that people don’t even know.”

Simpson said screenings of “Linoleum” at the festival convinced him the film plays best with large live audiences.

“We need people to sit together in theater as a shared experience,” Simpson said, adding that a wider theatrical cast is planned for later this year.

For now, that makes Cinema Columbus a perfect opportunity to check out the film.

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“You can sit at home and watch any movie,” Kreuzman said. “But it’s a very different feeling when you’re sitting in a dark cinema with a big screen and a few hundred people. It kind of becomes a wave, and you’re all swept up in this experience together.

In the meantime, West — who already made a very low-budget movie, “Double Walker,” in Columbus in January 2020 — wants to continue making movies with his friends, including another shot in Columbus.

“We want to bring the movie to Columbus,” West said. “It’s not that we’re the only ones making movies in Columbus anymore. We felt like that in high school, but now you look around and there’s such an infrastructure in Columbus that didn’t exist.

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In one look

The film “Linoleum” will screen as part of Cinema Columbus at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Southern Theater, 21 E. Main St. Writer-director Colin West, producer Chad Simpson, actress Amy Hargreaves and CEO of COSI Frederic Bertley will participate in a post-screening Q&A. Tickets are $10. Cinema Columbus runs through Sunday, May 1. For screenings, schedules and more information, visit www.cinemacolumbus.com.