Art students at the University of Minnesota had the chance to show off their work at the first university student independent film festival on Thursday.
The festival was hosted by Maeve Jackson, a first-year MFA candidate in the art program at the university. During the semester, Jackson proposed the festival as her final project.
Jackson has worked at the Milwaukee Film Festival for 10 years and wanted to bring her experience to create a university-level event.
Through conversations with her advisor, Graeme Stout, Jackson learned there were larger film festivals open to the student body, but Jackson wanted the festival to be one where art students could show each other their projects outside the classroom.
Student Max Reynolds helped Jackson, who said Reynolds saw the value in an art-focused, expressive film festival rather than a more commercial one.
Jackson hoped the festival audience would get to experience something new.
“A lot of staff and faculty and other students maybe see students grabbing their gear and getting ready to make something, but they don’t always witness the making and the final product,” Johnson said.
Modeled after the Milwaukee festival, Jackson planned the festival to also include a question and answer session with the student filmmakers, a viewing party of the 13 films and awards. Jackson said the awards are fun and playful, based on each student’s film and the emotions she had after watching them herself.
“It’s just sort of a fun, playful way to get feedback and have the filmmakers feel like their work is being recognized from someone who took the time to really sit and watch these a few times,” Jackson said.
The festival serves as a way for young filmmakers to get a feel for what submitting a film outside of the university is like, Jackson said. One such filmmaker was senior Stella Stockton.
Stockton’s film, “Good Grief,” is a collection of footage taken over a couple of months, including a trip to the beach in the south of France she said she found beautiful. Over the footage, Stockton incorporated voice notes of her family telling stories about her grandma after she died.
While Stockton said it feels more like a video to her than a film, she enjoyed the challenge of piecing together footage from beautiful places from her travels. She said the film took on a deeper meaning after adding the voice notes.
“I kind of derived a meaning from those two things working together about how grief lives in the background of even the really good moments,” Stockton said. “It’s not necessarily heavy, but it’s just it, it is in the slow moments and in the fast moments.”
The festival was a chance for Stockton to get to look at art with her peers, which she said is an experience she loves. Since a young age, she has been making videos and feels drawn to making the work.
“I just love the medium,” Stockton said. “It feels like an inexplicable thing, I just feel drawn to making work and it does feel important to make videos and make films. But I don’t think that’s why I do it, I think I just do it because I have this urge to.”