Thomas Edison Film Festival

The Thomas Edison Film Festival (TEFF) presents a program of selected international films including documentary, animation, and narrative shorts from the Thomas Edison Film Festival collection.  The program will be presented in-person by festival director Jane Steuerwald. Since 1981, the mission of the Thomas Edison Film Festival (TEFF) has been to promote innovation in the art of the moving image, and the films that are the centerpiece of the festival honor Edison’s vision.  Edison’s films did for the eye what his phonograph did for the ear. He made 75, twenty-second-long films in his West Orange studio. His earliest films presented magic shows, plays, vaudeville shows with dancers and strongmen, cowboys, and boxing matches.  The festival’s relationship to Thomas Edison’s invention of the motion picture camera and the kinetoscope and his experimentation with the short film is an essential part of our mission. Shorts are the essence of the festival - not a sidebar to feature films. TEFF is a socially conscious, modern, fiercely independent traveling showcase for shorts, reaching out to diverse audiences with provocative, timely, edgy and compelling new works by both accomplished and emerging filmmakers.  The Thomas Edison Film Festival welcomes all genres including narrative, experimental, animation, documentary, screen dance and hybrids. We celebrate films which address the environment, race and class, immigration, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities and issues of social justice. The films we celebrate are artistic, empathetic and engaging works which simultaneously teach and entertain.  

To learn more about the Thomas Edison Film Festival visit www.tefilmfest.org, to contact the Executive Director Jane Steuerwald, Jane@TEFilmFest.org, or Festival Assistant Elizabeth Kirshtein, EKirshtein@tefilmfest.org.