Festival Origins: By the community, for the community.
Partnering with local organizations to build inclusive community and improve access to our resources!
Our community is our inspiration! Barrington enjoys beautiful, well-maintained public spaces that, in a public-private partnership, host a growing number of community activities year-round, making memories as neighbors.
In our first event in 2021 on the subject of empathy, FLM FWD transformed the Town Hall's stunning campus into a festival village with spaces for eating, drinking, listening to music, kids activities. Films were shown on a massive 40-foot screen. Our second major event, a festival on the environment we produced in 2022, was held in the same location.
Since it’s inception, the festival has grown to partnering with other public entities with beautiful public spaces such as the Barrington Public Library and the Barrington Public Schools and has held seven events including larger festivals and smaller screenings.
Festival Origins: By the community, for the community.
Partnering with local organizations to build inclusive community and improve access to our resources!
Our community is our inspiration! Barrington enjoys beautiful, well-maintained public spaces that, in a public-private partnership, host a growing number of community activities year-round, making memories as neighbors.
In our first event in 2021 on the subject of empathy, FLM FWD transformed the Town Hall's stunning campus into a festival village with spaces for eating, drinking, listening to music, kids activities. Films were shown on a massive 40-foot screen. Our second major event, a festival on the environment we produced in 2022, was held in the same location.
Since it’s inception, the festival has grown to partnering with other public entities with beautiful public spaces such as the Barrington Public Library and the Barrington Public Schools and has held seven events including larger festivals and smaller screenings.
Location: Our Town Hall - Historically a Community Center
When it was conceived at the end of the 19th century, the town hall was truly the center for it all: besides offices, a school, and a library, the Town Hall housed a police department and a small theater/auditorium that was rented out for productions and social occasions. This was our inspiration and our first two major events were held on the grounds of the town hall. The building is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. It was constructed with tremendous local community engagement. At one time a rich agricultural community, the local farmers were asked to bring their field stones to the site of the town hall's construction. Right: The masons created this unusual and whimsical 'stone man' was in the stonework of the façade of the Town Hall near the back entrance.
Location: Barrington Middle School
Opened to tremendous fanfare in the fall of 2019, the technologically advanced, beautiful, secure school is a wonderful context for our festivals. Our third major festival (our second on Empathy) was held here in February of 2023. In addition to screening several dozen winning short films (1 to 30 mins in length) chosen from over 1800 international and domestic submissions, we enjoyed a jazz/funk band, art and food vendors.
The Barrington Public Library
Town of Barrington,
Barrington School Department
WaterFire
Bayside YMCA
Barrington Business & Community Association
FLM FWD Community Partners
We celebrate our community partners
The Barrington Sound Magazine
Bay Spring Community Center
Barrington DEI Committee
Bayside Pride
Culturally Responsive Learning Center (CRLC)
Press
At our first Environmental Festival (our second festival) we chose ten short films that were shown over two days. The jury and public agreed on the winner: Reviving Rivers. A film about a local initiative in India where a group of agricultural communities, led by scientists using age-old methods, the film is about a successful project to heal a damaging local weather cycle. This film was premiered at our festival and went on to win top prize at an established European festival the following week. It was then dubbed in Italian and shown at a Rockefeller-sponsored digital art festival with an environmental theme in Italy.
Identifying this film was a major feat. We are proud of the 25-person strong ‘everyman’ pre-jury reviewers that included 15 Barrington residents who sifted through nearly 1000 entries from almost 100 countries to find this uplifting, educational and fascinating short film.
Our Second Empathy Festival was held on February 11th.
Everyone remarked on the range of films and the amazing facilities including the stunning auditorium at the Barrington Middle School.
We had over 100 participants despite the last minute weather-obliged rescheduling and over 40% of the participants were BIPOC. In a town that is 96% white, this is a successful trend that began at our first event where the volunteers noted that they had never seen a public event as well attended by people of color in the community.
(This event was postponed from the 4th to the 11th of February due to an arctic air event resulting in dangerously low temperatures for the community.)
Founding and ongoing Sponsors
The Board
Lisa Lowenstein
Lisa Lowenstein, A Barrington native, is the Founder and Director of the Festival. Lisa’s parents are both RISD graduates. After an MBA at London Business School (Distinction) and 17 years living in Europe, consulting to museums and cultural institutions, Lisa returned stateside in 2009. Since 2010 she has been working in the area of creative placemaking (community building) and the re-envisioning of public spaces with arts programming as catalysts for community transformation.
Lisa can frequently be seen walking her black and white spotted hunting dog, Lucy, around downtown Barrington often on the Town Hall grounds. It was on these walks that she began observing the scale of the space, the architectural features of the buildings (Tudor, Elizabethan revival), the beautifully maintained plantings which contributed to creating the many different ‘corners’ of the space, natural and man-made. She then envisioned how the whole campus could be turned into a European-style town center, using lighting and other interventions to temporarily transform the area into a beautiful context, a sort of 'piazza' to build community.
Braxton H. Medlin
Braxton Howard Medlin, Esq, is a trial attorney hailing from Chapel Hill, NC. He moved to Barrington, RI, in July of 2020. An avid runner, he has always been invested in community building, whether through fitness, arts, or the pursuit of justice. After earning his bachelor’s degree in Romance Languages (Spanish) at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, NC, he completed two years of AmeriCorps service. He worked with the ACCESS Project as a Family Support Specialist, providing education and wellness outreach programs to individuals, families, and immigrant communities in rural North Carolina.
Braxton earned his Juris Doctor from Roger Williams University School of Law, where he was President of the Student Bar Association, a CALI Award winner in Trial Advocacy, and the recipient of the 2019 Public Interest Award. He and his fiancé live in the Hampden Meadows area of Barrington with their twin boys.
MaryAnn Sallas
MaryAnn has over two decades of experience in the nonprofit sector at management and board level. Much of the focus of her career has been on health and human services working within organizations that serve veterans, conduct medical research, and handle emergency response and train first responders.
Her career experience includes posts with REMSCO, The American Red Cross and the United Way.
She served as board member to: Friends of the Fisher House, The Friends Shelter Steering Committee and The Michael Stern Parkinson’s Research Center.
Education:
Master of Science (M.S.) in Emergency Management, City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in History,University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
She is fluent in French and Spanish and has traveled extensively visiting over 80 countries in Europe, North and South America, Africa, The Middle East and Asia.
Don Mays
Festival Artistic Director and Chair, Festival Jury.
Originally from St. Louis, he is a classically trained actor/director who studied at the National Shakespeare Conservatory in NYC. His move to Rhode Island was intended to be temporary but a taste of living on the ocean is all it took to convince Mays to stay and wonder why anyone would ever leave the east coast. His connection to Barrington goes back to the mid-1990s when he served as an advisor to the Town’s Substance Abuse Prevention Task Force. He then worked as a college recruiter. Now you can spot him cruising his favorite bike path on the weekends. Mays currently has his eye on several Barrington locations, including the town hall, for his upcoming film which will be set in the 1930s-40s.
Mays’ film credits include one feature film, an HBO short film, a documentary, and several short films and scripts. As a theatre director, Mays has worked with several local theaters including The Providence Black Rep and The Wilbury Theatre Group. (Please also see: Jury)