Video News Briefs

The winner of the Gale 2009 Librareo "Power to the User" Ad Madness Video Contest, launched in April during National Library Week, is Jason McCullough of Millington, MI, whose $5000 prize will be equally split between him and his favorite library, Millington Arbela District Library. Watch the five finalists' videos at www.gale.com/librareo; visit www.youtube.com/group/librareo for all 33 of the qualifying videos.

E1 Entertainment Distribution is now the exclusive distributor of the PorchLight Entertainment catalog of 50-plus DVD and Blu-ray Disc titles (new releases will be coming in November). PorchLight, which specializes in family entertainment, shuttered its home entertainment division in April owing to current economic conditions. More info at www.kochdistribution.com.

Beginning November 6, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, in association with some two dozen New York City cultural organizations and academic institutions, will sponsor a five-month festival focusing on the performing arts as a contributing force in the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe and exploring the revolutionary mind-set of performing artists through film screenings, exhibitions, readings, symposia, and theater, music, and dance performances. More info at www.performingrevolution.org.

The DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, an archive and research center devoted to films from or related to East Germany on DVD, will be commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall on November 9, 2009, and that of German unification on October 3, 2010, with a touring film series. Wende Flicks: Last Films from East Germany premiered in Los Angeles in late February in concert with an art exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The library will be making most of the Wende Flicks titles available on DVD throughout 2009. More info at www.umass.edu/defa.

Newly available from the Deaf Performing Artists Network: It's Everybody's Music, Vol. 1 (54 min. UPC 8-80074-13752-5. $19.99), a DVD compilation that features American Sign Language (ASL)-based interpretations of music videos—by artists including John Mayer, Christina Aguilera, and Eminem—for deaf/hard-of-hearing audiences. More info at www.d-pan.org and www.midwesttapes.com.