“This is Pike County” visits a rural Ohio community where drugs, poverty, the building of a nuclear waste storage facility and an unsolved murder threaten to erase the values and quality of life for its residents. The film will be shown Sept. 11 at Wexner Center for the Arts during the Cinema Columbus Film Festival, which runs Sept. 10-13.
Belinda M. Paschal
The Cinema Columbus Film Festival will run Sept. 10-13 across four different venues in Columbus.
Key Points
The Cinema Columbus Film Festival will run Sept. 10-13 across four different venues in Columbus.
The festival was voted the country's No. 1 film festival in USA TODAY’s 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards in 2025.
The festival features a variety of films, including documentaries and shorts, with some focusing on Columbus, Pike County and other Ohio stories.
Ohio gets a close-up in CAPA’s Cinema Columbus Film Festival, which casts the Buckeye state as star in several of its 75-plus independent selections.
The four-day event is bookended by showings of Ohio-related shorts, with the state highlighted in films such as “Free Beer Tomorrow,” about Ohio’s longest-running lesbian-owned and -operated bar, once located in Columbus.
The Arch City also appears in Renton Hinderer’s “Who is Columbus?” an exploration of his hometown through the eyes of locals, while “This is Pike County” focuses on a rural Ohio community struggling amid drugs, poverty and the specter of a grisly massacre.
Cinema Columbus, ranked the nation’s top film festival in USA TODAY’s 2025 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards, will run Sept. 10-13 at four venues. Special presentations will feature panels with filmmakers and other industry experts.