You are invited to be wowed this week at the 23rd Annual Film Festival at the Ainsworth Opera House. Local historian Michael Zahs who helped save the Brinton film collection from going to the dump, helped found the festival in 1996. He says it is now the longest-running film festival in Iowa and the smallest town to host one, “But when they’re the oldest films in the world, and they’re thought to have been gone for over 100 years, it’s significant. And I tell people that they can come and be wowed, it’s okay.”

The Brinton collection has approximately 140 films, and Zahs selects a few each year for the festival. Unbeknownst to anyone, some of the last existing Georges Melies films were being shown in Ainsworth, that is until recent years as shown in the documentary Saving Brinton. He adds that it is likely the only film festival in the country that solely uses films from the turn of the 19th century. Zahs shared a story of a man remembering one of the films, “A man came up to me after one of the film festivals and said he really liked that film, he remembered that film. Well, I knew he hadn’t because there are no living people that saw a Brinton show because they were last showing shows well over 100 years ago. Frank died a hundred years ago this year. But this man said, well he remember that film. And I didn’t want to disagree with him, but I finally said, ‘I don’t think you maybe did.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I never saw it before but I remember it.’ He said, ‘My dad saw it as a child, and it made such an impression on him he talked about it for the rest of his life in such detail that I recognized the film.’ And I don’t know whether we allow ourselves be wowed like that anymore, but I hope we can.”

The annual film festival is this Friday and Saturday at the Ainsworth Opera House. It is a freewill donation and begins at 7 p.m. each night with an ice cream social followed by the film screenings and some readings from Frank Brinton’s journals.