TO KEEP THE LIGHT to Open 1st Annual NY Indie Theatre Film Festival

New Ohio Theatre has announced that To Keep The Light, Erica Fae's multiple award-winning feature length historical drama, will open the first annual New York Indie Theatre Film Festival, showcasing features, shorts, music videos, and web series created by theatre artists branching out into recorded media. To Keep The Light will screen on January 17, 2017; the festival continues through January 21.

New Ohio Theatre is located at 154 Christopher Street between Greenwich and Washington Streets in New York City. Tickets to all festival screenings are $10 and can be purchased at NewOhioTheatre.org or by calling 212-352-3101. Festival passes are also available. For complete info on all showings in the festival visit NewOhioTheatre.org/nyitff2017. Like them on Facebook at /NewOhioTheatre and follow on Twitter and Instagram at @NewOhioTheatre.

Inspired by true stories, To Keep The Light follows a lighthouse keeper's wife as she struggles with her work - and her sanity - caring for her sick husband in 19th Century Maine. When a stranger washes up on shore, secrets buried in deep waters come to light, and she is forced to confront both her past and her future.

The film is an extension of Ms. Fae's work as a theatre artist. Her company, anecdota, is inspired by the (too) little-known (true) stories of women who dared to shape history. anecdota's production, Take What Is Yours, about Alice Paul & the National Woman's Party, inaugurated the New Ohio Theater on Christopher Street in 2011 and transferred off-Bway.

To Keep The Light won the Fipresci Prize/International Critics Award at the International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg, and Best of Show at BendFilm Festival. Actors include notable New York theatre performers David PatRick Kelly (Broadway's Once, Roundabout's Therese Raquin) and Jarlath Conroy (Broadway's The Seagull and The Homecoming).

Addressing the reason for starting the festival, Marc Stuart Weitz, Producing Director of New Ohio Theatre, explained, "So many members of our independent theatre community are branching out into films and web series. The complexity of navigating all the festivals out there can be daunting. We wanted to create a place for our community where theatre artists could share work and audiences could find them."

Other screenings at the 1st Annual NY Indie Theatre Film Festival include:

· Standing By: Gatz Backstage, dir. Shaun Irons (Documentary, 2014). Standing By: Gatz Backstage, dir. Shaun Irons. Standing By is an impressionistic and poetic documentary focusing on backstage life during 'Gatz', an epic stage rendition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, created by renowned New York Theater company Elevator Repair Service (ERS), in which the entirety of Fitzgerald's novel is voiced and enacted onstage. Standing By will be preceded by several short filmic INTERLUDES extracted from Why Why Always, Irons' latest live cine-performance which will premiere at Abrons Arts Center, fall 2017.

· The Last Great American Webseries, dirs. Morgan Gould and Nate Trinrud (Web Series, Special Advance Screening). Thanks to Morgan Gould & Friends, the web series genre is back. This five-episode mind bending journey into small-town seaside suburbia is just what the doctor ordered. So dial-up, log on, and strap in with this new American classic you never thought you needed. Before it's too late.

· Unicornland, dir. Nick Leavens, written by Lucy Gillespie (Web Series, World Premiere). After her divorce, Annie decides to date couples to learn how to love again. Over drinks, at dinner, in bed.

· Building America in Bethlehem, dir. Anisa George (Documentary, 2009. New York Premiere). A short documentary which follows the conversion of one of the largest steel factories in America into a casino-entertainment center. A poetic and dystopian exploration of the destruction of American industry and the remnants of the community which was built around it.

As well as works by Crystal Arnette, Jeremy Bloom, Darian Brenner, Veracity Butcher, Adrienne Campbell-Holt, Christin Eve Cato, Jon Ecklund, Joshua William Gelb, Anisa George, Jenny Grace, Carlos Ibarra, Nikko Kimzin, Poppy Liu, Eric Lockley, Marcus Lorenzo, Allyson Morgan, Nick Ronan, Carroll Simmons, Tommy Smith, Sarah Cameron Sunde, Michelle Sutherland, and Chris Tyler.

There will also be special counter-programming on January 20th, in honor of the Presidential Inauguration. For details, visit newohiotheatre.org/nyitff2017.

Watch the trailer for To Keep The Light below!

New Ohio Theatre is a two-time OBIE Award-winning theatre under the leadership of Robert Lyons, Artistic Director, and Marc Stuart Weitz, Producing Director. The New Ohio serves New York's most adventurous theatre audiences by developing and presenting bold work from today's vast independent theatre community. They believe the best of this community, the small artist-driven ensembles and the daring producing companies who operate without a permanent theatrical home, are actively expanding the boundaries of where American theatre is right now and where it's going. From their home in the West Village's historic Archive Building, the New Ohio provides a high-profile platform for downtown's most mature, ridiculous, engaged, irreverent, gut-wrenching, frivolous, sophisticated, foolish and profound theatrical endeavors. The theatre is accessible from the #1 train to Christopher St. or A, B, C, D, E, F or M train to West 4th St. For info visit NewOhioTheatre.org.