The Western Illinois Museum announces the next film in the Not So Easy Film Series. The documentary film Storm Lake directed by Jerry Risius and Beth Levison will be screened on Friday, October 6th at 7:00 pm and Sunday, October 8th at 2:00 pm at the Museum. Local media personalities will be on hand to participate in the discussion following the screening, including Community News Brief owner Lynne Campbell on Friday and Tri States Public Radio’s News Director Rich Egger on Sunday. There is a suggested $5 donation at the door.

As nearly 2,000 local papers have shuttered in the last 20 years, Storm Lake looks at the challenges of access to credible journalism in small, often rural towns. The film features Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Art Cullen and his family who fight to unite and inform their rural Iowan farming community through their biweekly newspaper, The Storm Lake Times—even as the paper hangs on by a thread. Twice a week, they work as civic watchdogs to protect their hometown and the legacy of credible journalism, at large—come hell or pandemic. The film’s director and Iowa native Jerry Risius stated that the idea for the documentary came out of reading Art Cullen’s paper and related to its rural Iowan voice; “...this at a time when local perspectives are seldom heard. Once I started to spend time with Art, I came to appreciate not only his own challenges as a newspaperman but those of his tight-knit family.”

The Not So Easy Film Series has been created for those who have questions that don’t have easy answers. Through the power of cinema, the selected films share another point of view and offer insights about issues that are challenging to understand, elude solutions, or sometimes even to imagine. The films in the series hold the potential to move us toward a more nuanced understanding of the world around us -even if we still don’t know the answer to those hard questions.

The November films in the Not So Easy Film Series will be Paper Tigers and will be screened on Friday, November 3rd at 7:00 p.m. and Sunday, November 5th at 2:00 p.m.