The crowd at first was small despite free admission. Only a dozen people were in the audience as the show began at 6 PM with a set of songs performed by three-fifths of the New Old Time String Band. Since the band’s fiddle and mandolin players were missing, the band consisted of two guitarists and TA Coon on that foundation of all great music, the washtub base. They played a mixture of folk and bluegrass, including a couple Bob Dylan covers.

By the time the main event started at 6:30, the crowd had more than doubled, including several cast members of "Jaffar," Mr. Wiant’s early adaptation of "MacBeth," filmed during his senior year for his high school English class. After a few technical difficulties, local community guy Dave Eckert got the projector working, and the show began.

The second set of films, which Mr. Wiant described as "self-explanatory" began with my personal favorite, "The Picker and the Redemption." This film, in black and white, is clearly more polished than his earlier work. The story, which Mr. Wiant says was inspired by his trip to Africa, is easy to follow despite the lack of dialogue. Heavy with symbolism, it follows a farmer who is forced off his land. He goes unwillingly at first, but finally embraces the modern age, throws away his tools, gets an office job, and buys a mid-sized sedan. Life goes on repetitively, and the farmer’s old life is forgotten, until, on his daily commute, the farmer crashes his car near to his old field, and returns to the land. But not before smashing his computer with the pickaxe he formerly threw away.

Next was another live action, combined with some pencil and paper animation, "The Animators" is an alternately sped up and slowed down view of animators at Hampshire College and the animation they produce. Mr. Wiant declined to show the last film "The New Frontier" due to "language issues," but we were able to watch the credit sequence, which seemed to be set in Africa.