What's on tap for this year's Rumschpringe Short Film Festival, being held through Saturday at the Stahr Performing Arts Center, 438 N. Queen St?

Like last year, a variety of short films made by local filmmakers will be exploring a variety of subjects.

Like Eagles fans.

Not just any Eagles fans. Extreme Eagles fans. The ones with green faces who will do whatever it takes to let the world know they love the Eagles.

It's called "Green Fans," by self-admitted die-hard Eagles fans Luis Ortiz and Damien Kalpokas.

Or how about a love story unfolding on the streets of Lancaster in Ryan Mast's music video "One Girl for Me," with music by Hiram Ring.

     VIDEO: Watch 'One Girl for Me'

In the abstract "Meditation on Intelligibility" filmmaker bex* wonders if there is such a thing as true gender or is gender just a construct?

A 12-year-old kid tries to win the love, or at least the interest of an older woman in Nik Korablin's "Mature for His Age," but doesn't have much luck.

And a man gets in trouble in a bar when the nuts and a pizza pie start talking to him in Bryan Schaefer's "Mixed Nuts."

In the animation field, Ron L. Good's "Robot Monkey Safari" is a quirky cross section of "Wall-E" and those old Saturday morning anime cartoons from Japan.

And things get starkly chilling and deadly in Joseph Krzemienski and Jeff McComsey's "American Terror: Company Man," which recently won Best Animated Short at the Philadelphia Cinefest 2009.

In all, 14 videos will be shown at the second annual Rumschpringe Film Festival.

This year, organizer Michael Hoober opened the festival to films that were up to 10 minutes long, rather than last year's limit of five minutes.

"Two facts made me go to 10 minutes," Hoober says. "A couple of good submissions last year went on too long and I had to disqualify them. And in the future, I want this to be a true film festival where we can show a weekend of different films, long and short. This allows for more advanced stories, more action, more character development."

The ever-evolving technology makes film-making more accessible for more people. Indeed, the technical quality of some of the films is quite amazing.

Hoober hopes that people, especially kids, can get involved in something that takes them away, in a healthy way, from the problems in their lives.

"My dream is to use these resources in working with kids to tell their stories," Hoober says. "To find new activities in Lancaster for kids and their families to get involved in. I remember when I was a kid and my parents got divorced, my band helped me a lot."

 The festival judges will award in five categories: animation, music videos, family, drama and comedy. A sixth award will be voted on by those attending the festival.

Hoober says he'd rate the whole festival somewhere between PG-13 and R, mainly because of language.

THAT'S THE TICKET

Rumschpringe's 2009 Short Film Festival

Thurs. (tonight) 7 & 9:30 p.m.

Fri. and Sat. 3, 7 & 9:30 p.m.

$6 matinees, $9 evening

Stahr Performing Arts Center

438 N. Queen St., 396-7764
www.rumschpringe.com
www.seventhsister.com