As anyone from Baltimore who watches The Wire will tell you, it’s fun seeing your neighborhood on TV. On March 1 at the Hoff Theater, students can supersize that experience by attending the UMD Film Festival.
“It’s an opportunity for filmmakers, students all over campus to premiere their own-made work that they’ve done … and to be able to show it and win prizes,” said Shira Dickler, vice president of service Tzedek Hillel and head of the festival. “A lot of them use College Park as the basis for their movie, and there’s something pertaining to the university in it.”
Dickler mentioned WebAssign: The Movie, a film about trying to destroy WebAssign (something students certainly can root for), as one of the movies with a campus angle.
Another film to celebrate, CP Space, has a student venting rage on a printer after a mysterious drip from the ceiling broke it. The student was frustrated at the university for not reimbursing for the printer, and let it out by hacking the machine to death à la Office Space – and that’s the entire movie. The flippant nature of the film combined with the campus-specific angle is something you won’t see at any other film festival.
Relatable to more than just campus students is university alumnus Michael Coleman’s Any Other Way, an exploration of the impact of one small decision (whether or not to buy an ice cream bar) and the different paths one person’s life takes after making that decision. The film was shot on the campus, right outside 7-Eleven and at Santa Fe Cafe, and boasts a unique structural design.
“The whole story is splitting in half, basically, and it keeps going back and forth between the two paths,” Coleman said.
Coleman likely represents the more experienced end of the filmmaker pedigree spectrum at the festival. A May 2008 graduate, Coleman has attended the New York Film Academy, was previously one of the directors on UM Film Club’s Etiology and has worked with the athletic department filming games. It shows that the film festival can run the gamut, from casual one-joke affairs like CP Space to something more carefully constructed ones like Any Other Way.
Awards will be given out to winning films in three categories (shorts, comedy/drama and documentary), as well as an audience choice field. In addition to providing entertainment, the festival also serves as a charity event. Dickler’s organization, Tzedek Hillel, is a Jewish social service and advocacy group, and she wanted to create an event to support her cause. Thus all proceeds are going to Refugees International.
Those funds will aid refugees from Darfur and the Congo, something Dickler is passionate about from personal experience.
“I volunteered with refugees from Darfur, Eritrea and the Ivory Coast in Israel,” Dickler said. “It just really opened my eyes to [how] we know that there’s a conflict in Darfur, we want to stop it, but where do the refugees go who manage to get away?”
The UMD Film Festival will be held at the Hoff Theater on March 1 from 3 to 6 p.m. Doors open at 2:30. Tickets are $5 for students and $7 for the general public.
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