CURRENTS

Amy Warden ’09, Lyndsey Godwin ’10, and Derek Murphy ’11 presented their short films at this year’s Gollin Film Festival, an annual showcase featuring some of the best student work at the University

A “documentary” about a global epidemic of insects undergoing metamorphosis in reverse, a pair of human hands performing perfectly ordinary activities that captures the imagination, and an angst-ridden occultist who literally loses his head while entertaining an unfazed family were the top short films that garnered prizes at this year’s Gollin Film Festival, an annual showcase that features the best of student work at the University.

Sponsored by Rochester’s Film and Media Studies Program and named in honor of Professor Emeritus of English Richard Gollin, the competition gives undergraduates the chance to gain recognition and present their short films to an audience.

“This year’s competition yielded an especially broad range of films, and it attracted an unprecedented volume of submissions from women,” says Sharon Willis, director of the Film and Media studies Program and a professor of art and art history and visual cultural, of the 15 films selected for the festival held on April 30 at Dewey Hall. “These student films are technically very accomplished, conceptually challenging, frequently surprising, and often terribly funny.”

“I wanted to show that motion is actually fluid, that it is not stagnant in the way we imagine it to be,” says Lyndsey Godwin ’10, a film and media studies major who received first prize for her film Synchronized Living. “I wanted to do something simple to show that movement is continuous, something we take for granted.” Telefundraisers, a humorous short film by Godwin about the trials and tribulations of a group of student fundraisers, was also featured at the festival.

Amy Warden ’09, a film and media studies major, received second prize for her film The Phantasmagore, which focuses on the bizarre arrival of a freakish magician called upon by an apparently anesthetized middle class family to perform at their dinner table. Enraged by his audience’s failure to react when he removes his own head, the entertainer finds himself unable to punish his audience in the manner he threatens as his host totes his head out with the rest of the trash.

The festival also included Derek Murphy’s perversely realistic faux documentary Chronological Reversal: The Spreading Epidemic! The film was created mostly with black and white nature and insect footage from the 1940s that he found on www.archive.com. The short film reports on a disastrous ecological epidemic in which creatures and plant life develop in reverse. “I love all things odd—music, people, especially insects,” says Murphy ’11, a double major in brain and cognitive sciences and film and media studies.

The Gollin Festival, now in its fourth year, is open to University undergraduates. The works were created in a variety of formats, including mini-DV, VHS, DVD, and CD-R. The films are judged by a panel of faculty members associated with the Film and Media Studies Program.

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