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Arts & Entertainment

Bazaar Memories to be Seen at Media Film Festival

The Media Arts Council will hold its 4th annual film festival featuring 21 films. The makers of one of the featured documentaries talk with Patch about their film.

To fit its name, the Bazaar was a unique place.

The Bazaar was an indoor shopping center that existed in Upper Darby Township from 1960 to 1993. White Lyte Productions, an independent production company located in Central New Jersey, chronicles the history of the beloved Delaware County landmark in their documentary Bazaar of All Nations.

The film will be the last one shown Friday night at the 4th Annual Film Festival at the Media Community Center (Third and Jackson streets). The festival, hosted by the Media Arts Council, runs March 3, 4 and 5. The Bazaar of All Nations film runs at 7 p.m. Friday before the late night horror fest, which is new this year. Click here for an extended schedule of movies and links to purchase tickets online.

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The Bazaar documentary focuses on the historical aspects of one of the first indoor shopping complexes and its community element, which is what made it so unique, according to a White Lyte press release.

Pat Manley, one of the two film’s producers, was the one who came up with the idea in 2000 when he found a complete lack of information about the Bazaar on the Internet.

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"I felt it was a unique place and wanted to immortalize it somehow," Manley said. "It wasn't until 2006 when I met director Melissa Whitely that the idea to make it a documentary film came about. She's not from the area, so it took some convincing to get her on board. When she saw the public response to the mere mention of the idea, she was sold. I grew up in nearby Collingdale, so the Bazaar was a large part of my childhood and adolescence."

Brendan O'Riordan, the film's other producer and currently a Media resident, also grew up in Collingdale and frequented the Bazaar with his parents. He recalled his own childhood Bazaar experiences.

"The Bazaar was an amazing sensory experience for me. The sights such as the giant suit of armor in the lobby; the sounds of the various talking birds in the pet store; the smells of soft pretzels and sticky buns baking; the feeling of the blast of hot air in the winter or cold air in the summer as you entered the lobby and the blowers hit you," O'Riordan said.

In December 2008, he was asked by Manley to become co-producer on the project. He researched old newspapers, property deeds, maps, and the Internet to collect historical facts behind the Bazaar's story.

"I remember the first day of my research," O'Riordan said. "I set out to find out how the Bazaar was built, and discovered that the 40-acre property on which it stood was once part of the Burn Brae Asylum grounds. That was the first of many fascinating stories which we would come to learn about the Bazaar. Through the research Pat and I identified managers, store owners, and employees. We then tracked down the individuals themselves or in cases where they were deceased, their nearest relatives. Those people make up the majority of the interviews featured in the documentary."

It took White Lyte about two years to line up and shoot the interviews, and then it was a production race to get the film released by a very special date. The movie made its debut on Thanksgiving weekend of last year, just in time to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Bazaar's opening, and had a successful 17-day run at Lansdowne's Cinema 16:9 before the DVD was released in a few area stores. 

For one of these stores in particular, the documentary had a profound effect. Melissa Whitely, the founder and owner of White Lyte Productions and the director, editor and sole cinematographer for the film, shared the moving tale.

"Peddler's Alley, one of the retailers who has a connection to the Bazaar and offered us a location to shoot, was being hit hard by the economy. The heat in the store had just broken down and the owner was facing the tough decision of which employees he needed to let go," Whitely recalled.

Whitely said the film was so well received at Cinema 16:9 that the theater extended the run for a third week. So she and the producers decided to expand the purchasing options beyond the Internet because of the wide demographic.

"We reached out to Peddler's Alley and asked if they would like to carry the DVD for sale in the store," she said. "They were excited to continue to be a part of the Bazaar doc and we dropped off a box of discs for them."

Whitely said a story broke in one of the newspapers on Christmas Day that said, because of the success that Peddler's Alley had with selling the Bazaar, they were able to fix the broken heat problem and the manager did not have to lay anyone off. He reported that people were coming into the store who never knew it existed but they saw online that they could buy the Bazaar DVD there. The newspaper article also went on to say how impromptu reunions were being had by people on missions to buy the Bazaar, bumping into friends in Peddler's Alley that they hadn't seen in years, Whitely recalled.

"To me this is the best moment of this film. The reason I am a filmmaker is to connect people. And this story is an amazing example that film does have the power to unite us in a feeling or a moment in time. In this case, a location that's long gone, but not forgotten," she said.

The Bazaar of All Nations DVD will be on sale each night of the festival.

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