IU film students will have an opportunity to showcase and honor their achievements at the sixth annual Montage Film Festival on Friday. A collaboration between IU Cinema and The Media School, the festival will give student filmmakers an opportunity to celebrate their own and peers’ work.
The festival will be broken into two parts. The first half will showcase films submitted and nominated for the festival in an hour long display. There will then be an award ceremony to reward the work of the nominated filmmakers.
IU student filmmakers were free to submit a film for this year’s festival until March 20. Students could submit their works to several categories including fiction, non-fiction and experimental films. Films were recommended to be between eight to and 12 minutes long. This year, over six hours worth of films were submitted.
Eva Stuart, a senior majoring in film and TV production, has worked on films featured in the festival in previous years. She is the director of this year’s festival and said she is eagerly anticipating the chance to end her senior year with a commemoration of her growth and accomplishments.
“I’m really looking forward to getting together with the film community,” Stuart said. “I feel like I’ve really grown as an artist. I’ve really grown up here at IU during my time studying film.”
Stuart said the film-judging process for the festival is detailed and involves several rounds. The first round is evaluated by student judges, who then nominate the films for whatever categories they feel they fit best. Then, Stuart and her fellow director, IU senior Jack Armstrong, send the results to a second panel of judges, which consists of IU alumni.
The panel of alumni judges then vote on their favorite nominations, and those winners are revealed during the award ceremony portion of the festival. Stuart said the alumni judges are usually people with established careers in the film and TV industry. The alumni judges .
For some nominees, their festival submissions were their very first experience creating and directing a project. This was the case for Kathleen Lemme, a junior majoring in cinematic arts.
Lemme began working on her film “Kinships,” which explores family and relationship dynamics, in August. As the film began wrapping, the Montage submission deadline was soon approaching, so she decided to submit her finished project.
“The cast and crew were an incredible group of people,” Lemme said. “Everyone was really excited about the film, which just made it so much better because everyone wanted to make it and cared about it. So I’m just so grateful for the community that I found through this film.”
There are 11 categories that projects can be nominated for including Best Fiction, Best Director and Best Production Design. “Deadringer,” which senior film student Colin Wood edited and worked on over multiple semesters, was nominated for eight out of the 11 categories this year.
“With this project we actually had a working budget that we were able to raise and definitely a whole new experience,” Wood said. “We invested in locations and in art, production design, all that stuff, which I’ve never done before. So that, to me, was a pretty big deal. I think that’s probably the biggest difference from anything else that I’ve worked on.”
Wood has submitted films to Montage for the past two years. He said his experience submitting films to the Montage Film Festival has allowed him to significantly sharpen his cinematography and editing skills, and that the competitive aspect of his peers’ work motivated him to improve.
“More than anything else, that motivates me to be better and be able to compete with the other students who do such a good job,” Wood said.
The festival is widely regarded by students as a chance to celebrate the success of fellow student filmmakers and creatives.
“I’m really excited to just celebrate all of them and gather together and watch these incredible films and celebrate the hard work,” Stuart said. “I think it’s really inspiring to watch student films like this and to gather as a community and laugh and feel your heart break and really feel all the things all together in the IU Cinema.”
The Montage Film Festival will be held at 7 p.m. Friday at the IU Cinema. The event is ticketed but free to attend. More information about the festival can be found here.
