 Are you ready for warm weather and a little sunshine? The Appalachian Wireless team has decided to have the ultimate spring break event. The spring break event is going on now through the end of April and all smartphones are on sale with Appalachian Advantage. We are you. We are Appalachian Wireless. With Upikes Film, Media & Arts Festival just around the corner, students and local filmmakers are preparing to rock the big screen after notifications rolled out for submissions yesterday. Monday Mountain Top spoke with FMA professor Andrew Reed about the annual showing. This coming April marks the eighth annual Upike Film and Media Arts Festival. We started this festival, started taking submissions the first academic year that I came to Upike back in 2014. It was founded by myself, David Chabin and Aaron Asbury. David is currently over PIKE TV and Aaron is working at Appalachian and at first it was just me and those two students and then it kind of expanded into an actual full-blown course and then I've even now gotten the assistance of some faculty members over the past few years, work studies, evaluating all of this content because it's actually too much now for a single class to evaluate. We had, I think, 264 submissions, films and screenplays, which is quite a lot for a festival of our size that is basically something that is a side project at Upike for me and for my students, you know, this is just something I do. Since 2019, the FMA festival has been held virtually due to COVID-19, however, this year the festival is expected to return in person. That's what we're going to do. We're going to have an in-person festival for three days. It'll be Thursday, kind of midday through the evening, April 28th, and then Friday kind of same thing, midday through the evening and Saturday, mid-morning through evening and we'll have a variety of film screenplays. We're also looking at having some table readings live as well as an awards program. We may or may not have a banquet yet. We're looking at funding for that or if that's just going to be kind of hors d'oeuvres and that kind of thing, but we're really looking forward to this year's event. With over 250 submissions, Upike will host a variety of genres ranging from horror, drama, and even documentary. Also included will be filmmaker Q&A sessions. We have a variety of films we're showing. We have a couple of feature-length fictional films, scripted content. We have a couple of feature-length documentary films. We also have blocks of short films, and so we have a block of short documentaries. We have multiple blocks of short documentaries. We have multiple blocks of short fictional films that are dramatic in nature. Then we also have a comedy block of comedic short films. We have a horror block with short horror films. We also have a short block of animated content. We're also going to have an evening where we feature Upike-created content, as well as a film that the folks at Pike TV made about the fire department. So we have a variety of content. Upike's FMA Festival will be held April 28th to the 30th at the Appalachian Center for the Arts. For more on that and top news, I'm Joel Portrell.