Reading, Pa.- The first local screening of the film Is What Was by Albright alumnus and English lecturer Jerry Tartaglia will be shown on Monday, February 9, 2009, at 7:30 p.m. The screening, which is free and open to the public, will be held in Klein Lecture Hall, Center for the Arts.

Is What Was, which was supported by an Albright Creative Research Experience (ACRE) grant, premiered at MIX 21: The New York Queer Film and Video Festival on October 15, 2008.

This experimental documentary film essay began as a visual diary of a visit to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp near Berlin, where gay men were tortured and murdered by the Nazis. Through the use of vernacular photos of Nazi soldiers taken at the time of the Holocaust and present day images by photographer Sean Michael Kirk, Albright class of 2008, the film explores the formulations of sexual identity and the Nazi era. Art direction and technical assistance was provided by Tyler Arcaro, Albright class of 2009.

Tartaglia is an experimental filmmaker, writer and educator whose contribution to experimental film and queer cinema spans four decades. He co-founded Berks Filmmakers Inc., one of the longest surviving showcases for non-traditional film and video making in the U.S.

He was the first to write about the gay sensibility in American avant garde film and has screened his films around the world. In the early 1990s, he began the work of restoring and preserving the film legacy of Jack Smith.

Tartaglia currently teaches cinema and writing at Albright and is working on a new film.

For more information or disabled assistance, call Jerry Tartaglia at 610-921-7809. Klein Lecture Hall is located in the Center for the Arts on the Albright College campus at 13 th & Bern Streets, Reading.

Founded in 1856, Albright College is a nationally ranked, private college with a rigorous liberal arts curriculum with an interdisciplinary focus. The College’s hallmarks are connecting fields of learning, collaborative teaching and learning, and a flexible curriculum that allows students to create an individualized education. Albright College enrolls more than 1,650 undergraduates in traditional programs, another 500 adult students in accelerated degree programs, and 100 students in the master’s program in education. Albright College is located in Reading, Pennsylvania, about 60 miles west of Philadelphia.