Clark Planetarium launches new show at Shawnee State University

PORTSMOUTH – Described as “Visually stunning, haunting and often emotional,” “CORAL: Rekindling Venus,” chosen for the Sundance Festival, will open at Shawnee State University’s Clark Planetarium at 7 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 21.

The film also will be shown on Wednesday, Jan. 23, and Friday, Jan. 25. The Planetarium shows are always free and open to the public.

The Clark Planetarium is normally open at 7 p.m. Mondays and Thursdays. The first Monday of every month is Kids Night.

In the past six months Australian artist Lynette Wallworth’s “CORAL: Rekindling Venus” has played in 24 cities around the world and featured in five major festivals including the London Cultural Olympiad and the World Science Festival in New York to universal acclaim.

“CORAL” also scooped the “Best Art” prize at the 2012 DomeFest awards. The Sundance Film Festival 2013 New Frontiers program is the premier event in the United States that celebrates new and innovative screen work and CORAL has been invited to screen as part of the program. “CORAL” will be screened at the festival in Park City and Salt Lake City as part of a national Sundance USA multi-planetarium release.

In a first for Sundance New Frontiers, “Coral: Rekindling Venus” will reach beyond the Festival’s hometown of Park City to planetariums across six time zones from New York to Honolulu via Albuquerque and Anchorage.

“CORAL” is the first full dome work to be featured in New Frontier and the planetarium and full dome tour is also a first for Sundance New Frontier.

“The scope and ambition of Lynette Wallworth’s ‘Coral: Rekindling Venus’ is an example of just how powerful the convergence of art world imagination, cinematic storytelling and new media technology, can be, which is the focus of our New Frontier initiative,” said Shari Frilot, senior programmer for the Sundance Film Festival and Curator of the New Frontier exhibition.
Clark Planetarium at SSU is the only one in Ohio launching the film during a seven-day launch period along with planetariums in New York City, Baltimore, Houston, Albuquerque, Anchorage, Honolulu and Washington, D.C.

“‘CORAL: Rekindling Venus’ is a remarkable work in the full dome world. The film’s successes over the past five months attest to that,” said Annette Sotheran-Barnett, of Sky Skan.

“These are exciting times in the rapidly developing market for alternate full dome/planetarium content.”
Everything in “CORAL” is real. Nothing in the film has been constructed in a computer or in animation. This stranger than fiction world, is all real. The filming locations traverse many parts of the world but with most coming from Australia and New Guinea, where some of the world’s most diverse coral reefs endure.

The reefs in Papua New Guinea fall into an area known as the Coral Triangle considered to be one of the most ‘at risk’ marine ecosystems with the highest diversity of iridescent corals, fish, crustaceans mollusks and marine plant species in the world.