{"id":91741,"date":"2025-04-01T03:30:52","date_gmt":"2025-04-01T07:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/?p=91741"},"modified":"2025-04-02T08:58:05","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T12:58:05","slug":"theatre-professor-takes-feature-film-to-cleveland-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/04_01_2025\/theatre-professor-takes-feature-film-to-cleveland-festival","title":{"rendered":"Theatre Professor Takes Feature Film to Cleveland Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

A University of Toledo theatre professor\u2019s latest endeavor is taking him \u2014 and several of his students \u2014 to the Cleveland International Film Festival.<\/p>\n

Dr. Matt Foss is a co-writer and actor starring in \u201cLone Wolves,\u201d an independently produced comedy exploring aging, infertility and autism. It\u2019s available to stream through the film festival website<\/a> from Sunday, April 6, through Sunday, April 13, with its festival screening scheduled for National Autism Day on Wednesday, April 2.<\/p>\n

\"Matt

Matt Foss, a professor of theatre, stars alongside Cora Vander Broek in \u201cLone Wolves.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

It will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Playhouse Square\u2019s Allen Theatre.<\/p>\n

Foss will be in the audience alongside more than a dozen UToledo students and community members with intellectual and developmental disabilities in the cast of \u201cA Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream: A Jukebox Musical,\u201d<\/a> opening at the UToledo Center for Performing Arts on Thursday, April 10. The cast members are joining him to learn and network at one of the longest-running and largest film festivals in the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a professor in the arts, I feel it\u2019s important for my students to see me taking the same creative risks and seeking the same artistic excellence I am encouraging them to pursue in the classroom,\u201d Foss said. \u201cIt\u2019s important to me that those lessons don\u2019t ring hollow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Foss is active in the theatre world, with award-winning professional credits including 2019\u2019s \u201cAll Quiet on the Western Front\u201d and 2020\u2019s \u201c20K Leagues Under the Sea,\u201d both of which premiered as student productions at the UToledo Center for Performing Arts and received recognition from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.<\/p>\n

\u201cLone Wolves\u201d is his first feature film. It follows co-writer Cora Vander Broek\u2019s character, Fran, a single, pragmatic forty-something woman looking to conceive a child, and Foss\u2019 character Ben, a high school friend whom she recruits as a sperm donor. Over the course of a weekend shot onsite in northwest Ohio, Fran\u2019s careful plans are upended as she comes to learn that Ben is autistic and navigating significant mental health issues.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a person with autism, I was particularly thrilled to also tell a story around neurodiversity and those Gen Xers discovering how their brains worked when they grew up in a system and time without the tools or interest in investigating who and how they were,\u201d Foss said.<\/p>\n

\u201cLone Wolves\u201d is a microbudget film directed by Ryan Cunningham.<\/p>\n

At the Cleveland International Film Festival, it will screen in competition for the Roxane T. Mueller Audience Choice Award and the Reel Woman Direct Award for Excellence in Directing by a Woman. It is also nominated for the Cleveland International Film Festival Local Heroes Award for films made about Ohio, in Ohio or by Ohioans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"Matt<\/a>

Dr. Matt Foss is a co-writer and actor starring in \u201cLone Wolves,\u201d an independently produced comedy exploring aging, infertility and autism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":908,"featured_media":91742,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,60,1,7,43],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91741"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/908"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91741"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91744,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91741\/revisions\/91744"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}