Pittsburgh-based media arts nonprofit Keylight to serve the local independent film community

Samuel Long / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Not every film is as big as “Spiderman” or “Transformers.” But there are movies made for reasons other than large-scale entertainment. 

Take David Cronenber’s “The Fly” (1986), where an experiment gone wrong turns a scientist into a hybrid fly creature, or more recently, filmmaker Jesse McLean’s “Light Needs” (2023), which is an experimental documentary that explores the relationships people have with their houseplants. 

A new Pittsburgh nonprofit wants to highlight these types of films. Founded by Pittsburghers Christopher Smalley and Brady Lewis, the media arts organization Keylight was made to support “artistic innovation in the media arts,” according to an Aug. 28 press release. 

Keylight will hold a variety of film and video screenings in themed settings around Pittsburgh. That includes “The Fly,” which will be shown accordingly at Kingfly Spirits in the Strip District, and “Light Needs,” which will screen at Phipps Conservatory’s Botany Hall. The nonprofit will also offer a variety of workshops as a means of educating the local film community, one of which will be a free session called the “Dos and Don’ts of Shooting Video During Protests.” 

To kick off the organization, Keylight is hosting an audio and video dance party at Bloomfield’s Brillobox on Friday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $12 and available at brilloboxpgh.com. 

Smalley and Lewis both worked at the defunct Pittsburgh Filmmakers, which used to provide filmmaking education, hold screenings and give equipment and facilities access to those in the media industry. Smalley was the organization’s director of operations and Lewis served as its director of education. 

When Pittsburgh Filmmakers shuttered, both Smalley and Lewis believe it created a void in the local film community that needed to be filled. 

“We talked about it for a long time and how to do it and one of the roadblocks was finding a venue, a permanent home,” Smalley said. “Then we started to rethink it as maybe we can find spaces that will let us do some events, some screenings, some workshops.”

The plan is to still eventually find a permanent space, but for now Keylight is working with a variety of Pittsburgh businesses to host screenings. As part of a soft launch, the organization screened “Coffee and Cigarettes” (2003), an anthology film consisting of 11 short stories, at 61C Café in Squirrel Hill. 

All of these screenings are to highlight film as art, Lewis said. He explained that at its core, film and digital media is an art form that can be expressed in different ways. Exploring new ways to use the medium can be difficult, but it’s still “very important. 

“There’s a difference between art and entertainment. We don’t shun or reject entertainment but we veer towards the art side of it in terms of what we want to show,” Lewis said.

Keylight also wants to provide the Pittsburgh community with educational opportunities, which are difficult to find outside of university settings, Lewis explained. In November, there will be an Introduction to Shooting Film workshop, where attendees can learn to shoot super-8 film and project it to the screen. There are also plans for a month-long experimental film viewing and discussion workshop hosted by Greg Pierce, the former director of film and video at the Andy Warhol Museum. 

Lewis served as Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ director of education for 30 years. Filmmakers was partnered with 10 universities to teach their students video classes, which were also offered at a discounted price to others who weren’t enrolled in those colleges. 

“We put those non-credit, what we called independent students into the same classroom with the university students and they were paying a fraction of the price,” Lewis said. 

Pittsburgh Filmmakers also had filmmaking equipment available for its students and members to use, Lewis said, which made education even further available to the community. 

He said he wants Keylight to eventually offer similar benefits for Pittsburghers, though “things have evolved” and the organization’s methods will likely have to be different than Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ strategies. 

And after the organization’s launch, Smalley hopes it will successfully make up for the void following the loss of Filmmakers. 

“There’s a lot of organizations that have popped up and are doing some great things with screenings, but we’re not seeing a lot of workshops so we are going to really try to hone in on what people’s interests might be,” Smalley said.