Film captures birders

  • Bill Thompson
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  • Posted: Sunday, January 30, 2011 12:01 a.m.
    UPDATED: Friday, March 23, 2012 12:24 p.m.
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Director Alex Karpovsky’s “Woodpecker” continues the 2010-11 Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers.
/Alex KarpovskyDirector Alex Karpovsky’s “Woodpecker” continues the 2010-11 Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers.

Fanatical bird-watchers have descended on a small town in the Arkansas bayou determined to locate the ivory-billed woodpecker, supposedly declared extinct in tree and sky since the 1940s.

Dividing the small town between true believers and skeptics, environmentalists and entrepreneurs, amateur birder Johnny Neander and his fellow enthusiasts think he is destined to find the elusive animal.

Such is the set-up of director Alex Karpovsky's "Woodpecker," the fourth film in the 2010-11 Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers, a program of South Arts presented by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston.

A screening and director Q&A will be at 8 p.m. Friday in Room 309 of the Simons Center for the Arts, 54 St. Philip St. The event is free.

Karpovsky, also an actor, has been named one of the "25 New Faces of Independent Film" by Filmmaker Magazine.

The fifth and sixth films in the series are scheduled for the first Friday of March and April.

For information on the screening, call 953-4422 or visit www.halsey.cofc.edu. For additional information on South Arts and its programs, visit www.southarts.org.