The free Plattsburgh Film Forum is coming back to the Strand Center for the Arts, Tuesday, October 7 at 7pm. The event aims to celebrate engaging local, independent, and amateur cinema. October’s showing is “Volume 2: Young Filmmakers/Local Films”: a selection of short films made by SUNY Plattsburgh students and professors, as well as winning films from the Mountain Lake PBS Beyond the Peaks festival for high school students.
The forum is co-curated by English Professor Michael Devine and Communications Studies Professor Lauren Zito. Devine, who directs the Center for Interdisciplinary and Area Studies, says it’s a chance to show off student work from across departments, but also to involve the community. It’s the latest installation in the Center’s ongoing HUMAN (viewpoints) project, “a college-community collaboration exploring what happens when we look at the world together.”
Devine, who taught a Film Adaptation class last semester in which students made short films, reached out to Zito to widen the net. “Lauren is a really interesting filmmaker, is always at work on a ton of cool projects, and does a lot with students through PSTV. I knew she’d have a variety of films to share.”
Mountain Lake PBS is also sharing winning films from the annual Beyond the Peaks Festival, the high school filmmaking competition they host at the end of each school year. “Beyond the Peaks is a celebration of young filmmakers and a testament to the power of digital storytelling,” says Jennifer Kowalczyk, Director of Engagement & Marketing at MLPBS. Devine, who’s been a judge for the Festival over the past few years, had his eye on a number of films. “These students are very, very good filmmakers, and I think it’s a fun chance to mix them in with the college students: it makes the whole event a much more communal experience, and a celebration of many different kinds of films.”
There will be 15-20 shorts: music videos and art films, experimental shorts and mini-documentaries, animation and beyond. “This is all about shorts, exploring the form and making an impact. The films are like little poetic fragments exploring what a camera and a curious mind can do,” says Devine.
SUNY Plattsburgh offers students a number of ways into film and filmmaking, including classes in Communication Studies, English, the Film Minor, and PSTV, the student-run television station.
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