A/V Geeks Presents: Were You Scared?

For generations, the classroom projector taught kids everything they needed to know: long division, the water cycle, how to cross the street — and, apparently, what to be terrified of. Join the A/V Geeks for a night of vintage 16mm educational films devoted to the fears, anxieties, dangers and everyday disasters of growing up. These films promised to help young people face panic, worry, strangers, accidents, emergencies and all the other things lurking just outside the classroom door.Were they reassuring? Traumatizing? Surprisingly useful? Come find out whether these old films still have something to teach us — or whether, after decades of progress, we're finally living in the calm, carefree, completely anxiety-free world they were preparing us for.Vintage 16mm films. Childhood fears. Questionable reassurance. Presented with A/V Geeks founder Skip Elsheimer in person. TRT approx. 90 minutes. With over 36,000 reels filling his former two-story home in Raleigh, North Carolina, Skip Elsheimer is one of the world's premiere collectors of 16mm ephemeral films. He's spent more than three decades amassing otherwise neglected and forgotten short subjects—classroom films, amateur movies, newsreels, government films, and virtually anything else that was distributed on the small-gauge format. Under the banner of A/V Geeks, Elsheimer has digitized and shared thousands of such films for the Internet Archive, toured the country with in-person screenings, and helped organize the Bastard Film Encounter in Raleigh, an annual celebration of orphan films that are "ill-conceived or received; embarrassing or beyond the bounds of acceptability; poor in conception or execution; undesirable to those who should be caring for them; proof of something that should have never happened."Film Studies Center events are free and open to the public. Doors open thirty minutes prior to showtime.