Seven student films will be showcased tonight in the Tsai Performance Center during the College of Communication’s annual Redstone Film Festival.
The films will be shown over the course of two hours, followed by a brief awards ceremony.
The festival has taken place for many years, but more recently, the event’s benefactor, Sumner Redstone, has donated a larger sum of prize money.
‘We’ve had the Redstone Film Festival for 20 years, but for the last four years, Mr. Redstone has given considerably more money,’ said Sam Kaufman, who has worked with the festival for a number of years.
Redstone has given $5,000 to the festival each year for the past four years, Kaufman said. The first prize winner receives $2,500, the second prize winner receives $1,500 and the third prize winner receives $1,000, Kaufman said.
Although the festival itself is not a huge program, 19 films entered the competition, which Kaufman said is a very large number for such a small venue. Each film had a budget between $5,000 and $12,000, along with a crew of cast members ranging from 15 to 28 members, Kaufman said.
The seven films were picked from the entries and viewed by a pre-selection committee of Boston-area film critics and curators. Three or four judges will participate in choosing a winner tonight, Kaufman said.
The seven films who made the final cut for Thursday are ‘Sully’ by Doug Gordon, ‘By Any Other’ by Derek Frank, ‘Tough All Over’ by Keith Brown, ‘Doleena’ by Nana Taimour, ‘Freemh’ by Peqeen Quinn, ‘The Girl I Used to See Who Stole My Love From Me’ by Alan Wong, and ‘For Love or Skeeball’ by Rob Sundermann.
The film Derek Frank’s ‘By Any Other’ has already received recognition from the New England Film and Video Festival as winner of the Best Student Narrative Award.
‘Making films is sort of stressful, you work long hours, you always worry whether the film is going to come out the way you want it to look, and what the actors are doing, but I was lucky enough to work with people I trusted and it made the whole process easier,’ Frank said.
As a part of the Master of Fine Arts program, students are walked through the complex details surrounding their short film in a 16 month-long process.
‘This is one of the best things I have experienced in the MFA program,’ said Pegeen Quinn, director of ‘Freemh.’ ‘I was also very lucky to have such a great class,’ ‘Freemh’, which means ‘roots’ in Irish, is inspired by the work of the Irish poet Seamus Heeney, and was actually shot in Ireland, she said.
The only stressful part of the filming process for Quinn was the financial aspect, she said. The budget of such students’ film often comes from loans and even out of the students’ own funds, according to Quinn.
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