FilmClick

Columbia University Film Festival
New York, NY: 4.28.08 – 5.09.08
Los Angeles, CA: 6.04.08 – 6.06.08

Columbia University proudly displays the work of seven talented and up-and-coming graduate student filmmakers during last Thursday’s final screenings of the 21st Annual Columbia University Film Festival. The IFC Theater was pulsating with enthusiasm and energy unique to this type of festival, which truly celebrates the emerging new talent embodied by these student filmmakers. While each of the seven films screened during this final night where commendable for their technical and narrative qualities, two standouts of the evening had to be Carrie Schrader’s Don’t Mess With Texas and Alex Winckler’s Ralph.

Director Carrie Schrader showed not just one, but two films at this year’s festival: The Thorny Rose and Don’t Mess With Texas. In her latter effort, Schrader delivers a comic road tale of two tough and cocky lesbians who embark on a two-woman mission to mark the great state of Texas – from highway signs to the backs of truckers – with bold stickers proclaiming “a dyke was here.” When they stumble into a tiny roadside diner, the ladies bite off a bit more than they can chew and are taken by surprise by a great little gender-bender twist featuring a cameo appearance from By Hook or By Crook co-director/star Silas Howard.

Utilizing striking cinematography and a wonderfully vibrant color pallet, director Alex Winckler paints a beautiful portrait of love, loss, confusion, and hope in Ralph. Chosen among seven other films at the festival to receive the “Faculty Selects” honor, Ralph chronicles the turmoil experienced by Ralph, a young and naïve Englishman who is desperately searching for his elusive lover in France. Winckler not only succeeds in capturing the complex emotions bound up with first love, but also the sympathetic difficulty of being plunged aimless and neck-deep into a foreign country. While evoking a somewhat wistful and melancholy tone throughout, Ralph ends on a final hopeful and sweetly romantic note that reminds us even when everything seems to be going wrong, you never know when something better may come your way.

For dates and showtimes, visit: http://www.cufilmfest.com/

by Meghan Chandler, FilmClick Staff, mchandler@filmclick.com

Columbia University Film Festival
New York City: 4.28.08 - 5.09.08
Los Angeles: 6.04.08 - 6.06.08

Lost amid the Tribeca shuffle hides New York’s other major spring festival event, the CUFF. It’s a short film extravaganza featuring the thesis work of Columbia’s prestigious M.F.A. students. Their studies range from Film to Theatre Arts, and from Visual Arts to Writing, and the glossy finished productions on showcase this week at the IFC Center here in Manhattan’s West Village exhibit that fine bridge between academic insight and industry expertise. Columbia graduates are known for leaping into the industry. The past year alone boasts such Columbia-alum directed films as Stop-Loss, Superbad, Under the Same Moon, and 3:10 to Yuma, among many others, not including the countless projects that haven’t yet made it to a theater near you. The majority of this year’s CU films are shot on either HD or Mini-DV, although the occasional super16 may sneak its way in. Most are shot on location with small crews, and many of the actors are CU students themselves (which is not in any way a slight on their talent, far from it).

This kind of dedication to the cinematic arts is most definitely on full display this week. I was lucky enough to catch Program E, a nice selection of highly intelligent and cerebral work touching on such rich themes as marital strife, the generation gap, and life in poverty. Next door, Tribeca monopolizes the AMC Loew’s theaters all over town, rolling out the red carpet and tying down block-busting ticket lines for Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, and whatever snickering dunces are behind The Wackness. In contrast CUFF displays the modest attention to the fundamentals of filmmaking, the brains behind these satisfying scripts, and the sheer devotion to cinema makes it more an enjoyable experience, and blows Tribeca’s high production values and Hollywood affiliations out of the water.

The standout at my program was Edward McGown’s Out There, a psycho-suspense tale set in France that quite skillfully uses the element of humor to sell its realism. It’s written by Mike Walden, who also has two other films in competition. For my money, this is the guy to watch out for in coming years.

For dates and showtimes, visit: http://www.cufilmfest.com/index.html

by Michael Prall, FilmClick Staff, mprall@filmclick.com