To celebrate reaching their initial goal of raising $1000, American Film Society (AFS) will be holding the AFS Charity Fest Sep. 24 at 1:15 p.m. in the Auditorium.
The members of AFS have been raising money by charging admissions to showings of their films, like “Jo Davidsmeyer: Unleashed” and “Jo Davidsmeyer: Uncensored” and plan on using the AFS Charity Fest as a way to donate their earnings to local charities.
At the event, AFS will show videos that they produced for four different charities: the Humane Society of Sarasota, the Glasser Schoenbaum Human Services Center, the Meals on Wheels of Sarasota and All Faiths Food Bank. After watching all of the short films, audience members will vote for their favorite charity and AFS will donate $500 to the winning charity and $250 to the runner-up, followed by $150 and $100 respectively.
In addition to the monetary donations, AFS will also donate the videos they make to each charity. “Many local charities, as opposed to strong for-profit businesses, run on a strict budget and therefore are unable to fund adequate videos for their organizations,” president of AFS, Josh Wolff, said. “Doing this festival will produce these videos for the charities that they can use later on that they otherwise would not have.”
There will be brief intermissions between the videos with performances by other students, such as the Pine View Jazz Quartet, a violin piece from Michael Guo and a vocal performance by Sahil Pankhaniya.
AFS meets every Thursday at 1:00 p.m. in Mr. Goebel’s room for students who are interested in meeting new people, learning about film and charity work, which Wolff describes as the “ultimate purpose” of the club.