By Shelby Daniel
Last Wednesday, students assembled in the McGinley Ballroom to see the top 16 short films from this year’s Campus MovieFest, the world’s largest student film festival. Commonly shortened to “CMF,” this year marked the 10-year anniversary of the festival here at Fordham, and the films certainly did not disappoint.
Founded in 2001 at Emory, the goal of CMF is to provide students with the resources to create their own short films in a week’s time. This year at Fordham, there was a total of 71 film submissions by students, the most submissions ever to be made here by fellow Rams.
The variety of this year’s films was stunning, as students explored a multitude of genres including comedy, horror, dramas and documentaries.
Each submitted film is judged by a panel of university faculty, staff and students before moving on to the next part of the competition. The top 16 are showcased during the actual festival, with the top four earning the Jury Award.
The Jury Award winning films will go on to screen at TERMINUS Conference + Festival this Summer in Atlanta and will be considered for national award nominations including the chance to screen their films at the Cannes International Film Festival.
Except for the judges, no one knows which films are to be screened at the festival. Audience members and filmmakers alike were at the edges of their seats waiting to see what the next film would be, with cheers filling the air in support of the finalists when they first appeared on screen.
One of the four Jury Award winners and a standout showcase due to excessive laughter from the audience was the relatable tale of “Our Picture.” Directed by Stephen Kipp and Erin Kiernan, the film told the story of a couple too scared to ask passersby to take their picture. What was most impressive about the film’s story, though, was that most of it was not even scripted.
“Most of it was improvised; we had the basic reaction to each person who would pass by written in notes on a phone,” said Kipp.
Differing from this effective improv was the stop motion movie with a message “Plastic World.” Created by Gabrielle Perez using any leftover scrap paper she could find, the film highlighted the dangers of plastic contamination in the ocean.
“Any platform I get, I always try to talk about sustainability and environmental issues,” said Perez. Along with a Jury Award, “Plastic World” also won the Audience Choice Award for having the most fans in the audience.
Taking a sharp turn from sustainability was the horror inspired “The Globe: Part I,” the first of a two-part film saga written and directed by Tom Cobb. The film used impeccable direction and suspenseful script writing to capture the attention of the audience and win the third Jury Award of the night with a story about teleportation and a zombie-like side effect.
Rounding out the Jury Award winners was the freshman-written and directed drama “River,” where Nicholas Collette and Sotiris Georgakopolous tell the story of an unlikely and short -lived friendship.
The filmmaking duo said that the process of making “River” was “exhilarating” and “just lots of fun.” With its beautiful cinematography and melancholy story line, it definitely earned its win.
Additional awards included two Silver Tripod Awards. “Two Surprises, One Afternoon” took home the Tripod for Best Direction. Charlie Murray won the Tripod for Best Performance in “Benji, The Boy Who Has Never Done Anything.”
Murray was asked to take part in the film along with Kevin O’Malley and Tim Mountain only an hour before shooting. The spontaneous participation allowed him to capture the overall essence of CMF in the brief experience: “it was a fun time with great friends.”
