Production of applause and ideastream.

Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Coming up, we spotlight a PBS parody that sets its story in the 216.

Later, we take you to Cincinnati's burgeoning garment district.

So Valley.

and the Cleveland Orchestra provides a dramatic take on a Shakespeare classic.

Hello and welcome to another round of APPLAUSE.

I'm your host, Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

Fans of Antiques Roadshow on PBS ought to get a kick out of a new film screening at the 2025 Cleveland International Film Festival.

It's called Lost and Found in Cleveland and I recently chatted with the filmmakers behind this indie comedy.

Cleveland, the best location in the nation.

I was originally an actor that moved from New York to L.A., and I met Marissa, my cohort, the other half of W films, and she said that she had this idea about Antiques Roadshow and wanting to do a film that was based on that.

But she was from L.A. and she didn't want to have it place there.

And I said, Well, I'm from Cleveland.

And she said, Well, that sounds hysterical.

And I said, Hey, don't knock Cleveland.

You've never been there.

You don't know what it's like.

And then that kind of set us on this journey.

And I grew up watching Antiques Roadshow.

I mean, it's what I watched with my dad.

It was our Monday night thing.

And I, I just loved these real people coming in with their objects and telling their personal stories.

We filmed all over the Cleveland area, a lot of iconic places like the West Side Market, St Stanislaus, the Nash and Slavic Village.

We were at the Western Reserve Historical Society.

We filmed in Canton at the William McKinley Presidential Library and Museum, which actually is a big part of the genesis of the idea as well.

I went to the William McKinley Presidential Library and Museum with my mom.

They also had an exhibit about the Wizard of Oz, and it said that The Wizard of Oz was an allegory about the American dream during McKinley's administration and that it had ties to Northeastern while Dorothy was the common man.

Tin Man, the factory workers scarecrow.

The farmers that I stood for ounce.

The gold standard was the yellow brick road and that McKinley was the wizard.

And the guy behind the curtain was Marcus Hanna, who was a Cleveland politician, his campaign manager, and that he may have been pulling the strings on a puppet president.

And so we said, What if we did a modern take on Wizard of Oz?

What if, instead of Dorothy and Scarecrow and Tin Man, it would be a little boy and a mail carrier and a retired steel plant worker, and instead of a heart or a brain, they would have these objects that were their prized possessions in their lives, and they would bring it to the appraisers who were the wizards.

And they would say the same thing that Professor Marvel says to the scarecrow in Tin Man, which is that the answer to your self-worth lies within.

This is a very important work of art.

I think you're overreacting.

I hate you.

Let's go.

Don't you love me like I should?

You nervous?

A little.

Me too.

There's a lot of Easter eggs in the film.

There's even you know, there's some of them were accidental.

Dennis Haysbert plays the mail carrier, and we actually got him 48 hours before filming.

But the first day he shows up, we're filming at the West Side Market.

We are at the butcher stand and we're filming and we see there's a sticker Go Tribe and the and the stall and it's in frame right beneath him.

And we're like.

SARON What?

How is that possible?

Keith GERCHICK, who is living now in Hollywood and says, I'm writing and I'm producing a film called Lost and Found in Cleveland.

I said, I'm in.

Sign me up.

He goes, I want you to do a sequence with Dennis Haysbert.

And it's a dream sequence.

And I want you to storyboard it.

We'll have the composer who worked on La la Land.

The luxury of an ensemble is that you get to have some of your favorite people play.

Jon Lovitz, for example, is doing his incredible Jimmy Stewart as the mayor of Cleveland.

In our film, Eliza, while is doing a phenomenal job as a hunting Valley socialite.

We picked up the most exquisite piece in Tunisia.

Her delivery is impeccable, and so we really just concentrated on, okay, whose voice do we hear in this role?

And and truly, our film is a modest budget, so we had to be nimble.

We had to have a script that actors would want to come to Cleveland to film in January.

And we explained this is a love letter to Northeast Ohio.

This is a love letter to the American Dream.

This is a love letter for people who are curious, who are hungry to return to the theaters with their families.

I think we just wanted to do traditional storytelling.

It was the kind of storytelling that it felt like Hollywood had veered away from.

Hollywood, understood the concept of an ensemble.

There's an underestimation, I think, of audiences.

There has been an underestimation of the film.

It's a mission of ours to have Clevelanders believe in themselves that the goal of the film was to have the nation look upon Cleveland as we do.

We had a very good mentor who was a director who said 95% of your job as a director is to hire the right people and then trust them to do what you hired them to do.

When we told you in Squibb, Hey, this is the scene, and she already knows she's bringing her own personal history to that role.

And we role and we're all crying when she's putting on lipstick.

That's a testament to obviously a master class.

And these veteran actors.

And when June and Stacy Keach are the first ones to come on board, it then makes other actors want to come on board because they know the caliber and the bar that you're setting of what the acting and what the script are.

This film is going to have a life beyond its theatrical release.

We want people going and doing tours around the city, trying to find the locations for the film.

I think it's going to add to the local economy for years to come and we're really grateful to have that be part of our legacy.

Lost and Found in Cleveland is one of more than a hundred feature film screening at the Cleveland International Film Festival in Playhouse Square.

from film festivals to music festivals to garlic festivals.

There's so much to do here in northeast Ohio.

You can stay on top of the arts and culture happenings in this region by getting our free weekly newsletter.

It's called The To Do List.

Sign up when you visit our homepage Arts Sport Ideastream Talk Now let's meet a fiber artist from Columbus who just loves animals so much so that Celeste Malveaux Stewart uses the fur of happy sheep, goats and even alpacas in her work, My work really consists of the intersection between fashion and art.

I create couture pieces, meaning 19th 5% of these pieces are made by hand, and I work using a sustainable model.

So I'm very mindful of the materials I use my supply chain.

I'm making most of the pieces, so it's very mindful way of creating.

I had my own brand in San Francisco when I graduated from uni and I realized that I was filling up these big bins of waste and although they were all natural fabrics, they were still waste and they would eventually have gone to the landfill.

And so that kind of terror and concern really inspired me and motivates me to this day to think about how do we continue to use more and more waste material and also any new materials that I'm using like the alpaca fibers, how sustainable are they?

Alpacas, one of the most sustainable fibers and animals to breed.

So that is sort of the crux of my motivation.

I work with local farmers.

I love my local shepherdess that I work with to obtain their really beautiful, luxurious fibers.

I incorporate alpaca and wool and pine guerra from all Ohio farms, and I felt them.

I use these ancient techniques of Nuno felting and natural dyeing to create the surface design and the textile itself.

So it's an interesting process because I'm creating the textile as I'm creating the design.

My process is unlike a conventional designer's process, where they we usually draft a pattern, we cut the fabric.

We so it might be the beginning of my process starts, obviously at the concept, it's usually the concern.

And then I think about how do I address a concern or how do I begin a conversation around a wearable piece, and then I start to think about it in textile form.

So I think about the surface design, the textile, the hand, how does it feel, how does it drape before I actually begin forming the silhouette?

And then as I go and I play a lot, I love exploring.

So because there's so much handwork involved, I'll sell samples, you know, I'll Nuno felt samples using different materials and see how they behave and see the outcome.

And then I'll embroider on to the felt.

Sometimes I'll layer my surface designs so I create the little pieces of textiles, and then once I know that they're going in the direction I want them to go, I'll naturally dye them.

I'll pick my dyes.

I have to forage my dyes a lot of times.

So when I have all those materials and I like my samples, then I begin to think of the silhouette.

And also a lot of times the the fibers themselves speak to me because I know all of the animals whose fibers I use.

So, you know, if gandalf's extra curly that summer, then I'm going to kind of go in the direction where I highlight his curls on the textile.

We're so accustomed to fast fashion nowadays because that's what we all mostly buy.

But there's this slow fashion movement that I love saying that I helped pioneer because I've been doing this for 30 years and I talked about sustainability when no one really, you know, not many of us were talking about sustainability through 30 years ago.

So I think it's important to understand that there is a movement and it's a slow fashion movement and every one can partake in this movement, you know, consumers, makers, designers, manufacturers.

I think it's just a sense of mindfulness that we can all have.

And it's also it creates this wonderful connection that I believe happens when we can connect with the things that we put on our bodies.

We don't want to throw them away.

You know, they become special to us like those beloved pair of jeans that we all have.

And so I think that that that is a really important platform on which I create, and I'm hoping to continue to pass that down to all of the next generation of of makers and artists.

One of the most inspiring and moving experiences I had when we were in Cuba was actually going to one of their churches and realizing that as a Filipino-American, my culture has so much in common with theirs down to this idea of having this version of the Virgin Mary that we look, you know, we look to as a deity and how a lot of our ceremonies and rituals really intersect.

And I was really also I was moved, by the way, it was all encompassing.

I loved the way the Cuban culture embraces all of the aspects of their culture as a whole.

It feels like a melting pot.

We go to we go to places here in New York and we say that, But you could really feel it in Cuba, where I felt welcome.

And I didn't feel like they looked at me like, Oh, she's American or Oh, she's Filipino, or Oh, she's Asian.

It was it was an interesting lens that I felt like I was being seen there.

And I was really moved by that.

When we walked through the streets of Cuba of Ivana, we saw so many entrance ways, you know, and we don't get to do that here in the US because we all have doors.

And you got to you know, we don't have the types of corridors and entryways that they have there.

And there were always people either in the entryways hanging out or a dog sitting there or their child.

And it felt so inviting into like how they live.

They could be my neighbor here.

You know, the way they live is not any different from the way we live in a sense that we all want the same things, right?

We love our pets.

We love our kids, we love to hang out.

We love commune with our neighbors.

And so I just love that even though it looked so different and it felt different, the architecture was different.

Obviously, the culture was different.

It was not really that much different from the street that I live on here and German Village and condos.

do you have a story idea about an Ohio artist?

Let us know who's caught your attention.

In Northeast Ohio.

From Trumbull to Richland, Ashland to Ashtabula, we're looking for suggestions to showcase on applause if you've got an idea or to send them our way in an email to arts at ideastream dot org.

And thanks.

Now we take you to Cincinnati's West End neighborhood, where a group of like minded folks are sewing things up in a sustainable fashion.

This up and coming garment district is called Sew Valley.

So Valley was founded in 2017 by Rosie Kovacs and myself.

I have, let's see, probably 15 years in the fashion industry.

I work for a large fashion corporation for nine years and relocated here to Cincinnati, my hometown, in 2015, and organically linked up with my co-founding partner Rosie.

And she and I were both creative entrepreneurs and realized there were no resources for small entrepreneurs trying to build their apparel product and their creative brand here in Cincinnati.

And so we were lucky enough to receive a seed grant from the Hill Foundation, and we were able to start some valley, and we've been busy ever since.

So Valley's nonprofit, sustainably focused garment factory sample room and incubator space for apparel brands and individuals interested in the film trades.

Our mission is to help apparel entrepreneur owners and brands manufacture locally, sustainably, ethically and efficiently.

And we have a long term vision of creating a local garment manufacturing industry that empowers people to realize job stability, security and career paths.

I thought my only option graduating was to move, especially once I decided I wanted to be in that sustainable realm or a smaller business realm within the fashion industry.

So so values goal is to really help people like myself stay in the city.

So Valley is unique in that there's not a lot of factories within Cincinnati.

Generally speaking, there are not a lot of manufacturers within the United States in the apparel realm.

We're our own little Sam Sound garment district upstairs, we have National flag.

They've been sewing flags for 150 years.

And across the street we've got orange hair and they do upholstery and things like that.

So it's a great little community for us to pull from and bounce ideas off of.

And just, yeah, we're able to help each other along.

And in various ways.

We have three pillars.

So we've got our education, we've got our membership spaces, and then we've got our services.

Education kind of covers a lot of realms.

We've offered a really wide variety.

We've had basket weaving and a lot of natural dye classes.

We offer everything from development through production.

So what that means is we offer design, help, pattern making, sampling, prototyping.

We have fittings with our clients all the way to production and then we are small batch facility.

We consider small batch 10 to 100 units per style.

And I would say for the overall industry that is extremely low.

Unless you have significant startup funds, it's really hard to start an apparel brand because most manufacturers minimums are in the thousands.

So we exist to kind of help incubate you, start you off and help you grow.

I love our machines.

We have the button holder.

That's my favorite.

Honestly, the amount of streets such as that we have.

So just a regular locked stitch machine.

They all vary.

They all act differently.

We've named all of our machines so we know who's being bratty.

We have heavy duty equipment, clicker presses that kind of helps die cut materials and other specialty industrial sewing machines for heavy duty steaming stations.

The list is keeps growing.

An industrial machine can cost anywhere from 2000 to 5000.

Our membership spaces are affordable space where they can use any of our machinery.

24 seven.

We also rent out our machines, so we help a lot of little niche needs of just people in the community that need a space, whether it be for the machines or B for the actual physical space.

I'm a tenant here, so really I rent this space to do my sewing projects.

I went to U.S. engineering school, graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering.

I like to find something and then alter it into a vision that I might see for it.

When I first came here, I ordered fabric from Joann Fabrics, which you can order and custom colors.

But then when I came here, I started becoming more aware of fabric waste and all the waste in the fashion industry.

So rather than buying new fabric that's custom printed, I've been trying to find used clothing and used fabric.

The apparel manufacturing industry, although it's great, it does have a dark side.

10% of global gas emissions are from the apparel manufacturing industry.

Pretty much since the nineties, the majority of apparel manufacturing has been offshored and is pretty much been a race to the bottom for horrible manufacturing practices.

Garment workers being treated and so horribly and paid pennies on the dollar, as well as the environment and environmental impacts that come from that.

So we're here to not just talk the talk, but walk the walk and prove that that doesn't have to be the way apparel manufacturing can be done right here in our backyards.

And it can be a sustainable and rewarding career path for anyone looking to expand their skills.

So I think sustainability really starts with people.

And if you can't make a product and pay people what they need to be paid to maintain their lives, then that's not sustainable.

So Valley was founded with an ethos of creating sustainable brands, and that doesn't just mean sustainable over time where they're growing small and smart.

It also means sustainable regarding the fibers they're using, who's creating their garments, and really everything within the process.

So what?

So Valley stands for first and foremost as providing a living wage to the very skilled workers who are able to sew in the realm of the valley.

It makes it even more satisfying that we get to kind of take control of how design leads sometimes so we can kind of nudge the client in the right direction sustainably and show them what it's like to be sustainable and think about what their materials are doing after their product is finished, how their leftover materials can be reused and remade into something else.

Taking into account our sustainability goals and our efforts, we are a part of the United Nations Fashion and Lifestyle Network in support of the Sustainable Development Goals.

This will be our third year being a part of the Textile Exchange Network.

The Rust Belt Fiber Shed is our local fiber shed, which is a national organization in support of naturally sourced and grown fibers and promoting soil to soil life cycle of garments.

And we are new members of their value chain directory.

It's another great ally to have and in support of what we're all collectively trying to do here in the Midwest and specifically in the Rust Belt area.

The only skill level you need to come in and rent a space is to know how to make a payment every month, to appreciate everything else, to appreciate what the professionals here so Valley do.

I think you need to have made a lot of mistakes on your own to appreciate how smoothly they can make it go.

It's really amazing what our team is able to accomplish for such a small team.

They really can do anything.

So I feel just privileged to be able to work with everyone here and feel that it's my job to promote it and turn this place into a place that lasts for a long time.

We've got a great show in store for you.

Next time on APPLAUSE, see what contemporary artists have to say about bodies, culture and art history.

Women run the show, she said.

She said at the Akron Museum of Art.

A lot of these themes are really fruitful topics that artists are not going to run out of ideas in.

Plus, Northeast Ohio's Moises Borges brings Brazilian beach to the stage for the Tri-C Jazz Fest.

All that and more on the next round of applause.

So no noise for you.

But I'm boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

It's about time to close up shop, my friends.

Thank you for joining me for this round of applause.

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia as we sign off, let's listen to a stirring performance by the Cleveland Orchestra sampled from the orchestra's Adella app.

This is a piece by Jean Sibelius, inspired by William Shakespeare's The Tempest Production of applause and ideastream.

Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Cleveland really?

Cleveland, the best location in the nation for what typically happens is will ask you a few questions about your collection.

It's not my collection.

Well, it came into your possession.

We picked up the most exquisite piece in Tunisia.

Why it's important to you.

I always dreamed of opening a restaurant with my mom.

So what?

It is you would like to find out?

That was a different world.

I miss hours.

Oh, my God.

Is this.

This is a very important work of art.

I think you're overreacting.

I hate you.

Let's go.

Don't laugh like I say, You're nervous.

A little.

Me too.

You ar the youngest person we have ever had at Lost and Found.

We did it so turn on your magic, brainless.