Poppy Jasper Film Festival Coming Soon!
The Fifth Annual Poppy Jasper Film Festival will be held at the Morgan Hill Community Playhouse and Cinelux Theaters in Tennant Station from November 14th thru the 16th. This event focuses on Short Features, meaning films that are 30 minutes or less. The festival offers films in such diverse categories as drama, documentary, music, comedy and an open category for films that don’t conveniently fall into other categories.
Although the 2008 schedule seems a bit heavy on documentaries, there are a number of short features and animated films as well. In fact, the 2006 Best Overall winner, Binta Y La Gran Idea (Binta and the Grand Idea) by Javier Fesser from Spain, was a 2007 Academy Award Nominee for Best Live Action Short and one of the films presented at the first Poppy Jasper Film Festival, Lowriding in Aztlan, was signed for distribution and is available in stores nationwide as well as on Amazon.
For those of you wondering who, exactly, Poppy Jasper is, well you’re in for a big surprise. You see, poppy jasper isn’t a person at all, but is one of Morgan hill’s claims to fame. According to Bernadine Fine Art & Jewelry-
Morgan Hill Poppy Jasper is a famous, but increasingly rare orbicular jasper with red and yellow dots of “poppy flowers”. It is a brecciated jasper, meaning it probably came from sun-dried and oxidized iron-rich clay. The cracks were filled in by other substances.
Jasper is from the chalcedony/quartz group. It is a microcrystalline variety of quartz that contains up to 20% foreign material. These materials are what determine the color and appearance of the stone. Also because of the foreign materials, jasper is rarely uniform in color, it is usually multicolored, striped, and/or spotted.
Jaspers of all kinds have long been attributed magical powers in just about every culture known to man. Jasper was used in Ancient European times as a “rain bringer” and it is interesting to note that the word for jasper in some American Indian cultures also meant, “Rain Bringer”.
Morgan Hill poppy jasper is found in the area of Morgan Hill, California, USA. Other popular jaspers are found in Germany, India, Russia, Pakistan, France and the USA as well as many other countries.
