Looking for a break between exams? Come to Lightworks!
The Lightworks Festival is a showcase of Screen Arts & Cultures’ student films. Presented by SAC’s student organization FVSA (Film and Video Student Association), the Lightworks Festival is the venue for students to present their end-of-the-year production coursework to classmates, family, and friends of Screen Arts.
Even cooler, this is your chance to see a variety of talented, visionary filmmakers before they make it big and you have to pay to see their work on the big screen.
Going to any event at the Michigan Theater makes the event itself a hundred times more grand. Despite a tornado warning and wretched weather, the 14th Annual Festival put on the student group M-Agination Films was a smashing success.
Each year 10-15 short student films are created with the help of M-Agination films and the results are shown together at the end of the year. I have seen this festival for the past three years, and every year the overall quality of films has improved.
And live music now too!
As with many festivals, the genres of the films varied: “Oreo Therapy” was about a man getting over a recent breakup with the help of food-related gifts from his hall neighbor, while “Awaken Ann Arbor” was a documentary about a meditation group of the same name on U of M’s campus, and “Dreamer” was a full-on avant-garde piece that I will not even attempt to decipher.
This was a full event, with multiple half-hour films–“Co-Education” and “A Sense of Sound”–to end each block of the festival. There was a nice mix of comedies and dramas to take us on a subtle emotional roller coaster throughout the night. “Looking Back,” a depressing piece about a young student reminiscing about his lost lover, preceded “Babysitter,” a hilarious comedy about a young teen jumping through hoops to get the title job, and then we went to the documentary “Awaken.”
Vice President Anthony Kalil
The second half of the festival was much the same. We opened with “Fortune Teller Gynecologist” which is a comedy that needs no further description, on to “A Study in Tokyo,” which was a documentary shot during a class trip. The best part about “Tokyo” was that, despite being shot almost entirely with a GoPro, it was entertaining and edited well enough to keep the audience focused.
“Legs” was a groovy music video shot literally below the waist. “Three” followed three individuals with various disorders (OCD, Anorexia, Social Anxiety) and used images, rather than words to describe their daily lives. To cap off the night was “A Sense of Sound,” which was a lot like Whiplash, but with elderly people.
Overall, amazing festival and something to attend in future years.
Festival Line Up
Oreo Therapy Directed by Monica Dollive (4 minutes)
Looking Back Directed by Leo Sheng (7 minutes)
Babysitter Directed by Jameson Duggan (8 minutes)
Awaken Ann Arbor Directed by Will Ellis (11 minutes)
Hero Directed by Claire Holloway (2 minutes)
Co-Education Directed by Anna Baumgarten (25 minutes)
Intermission 15 minutes
Fortune Teller Gynecologist Directed by Michael Wylie (6 minutes)
Dreamer Directed by Layne Simescu (6 minutes)
A Study in Tokyo Directed by Rachel Goldberg (9 minutes)
Three Directed by Karen Hua (7 minutes)
LEGS Directed by Jorge Gonzalez (4 minutes)
A Sense of Sound Directed by Jeremy Borison (30 minutes)
M-agination Films is a student run organization on campus that runs similarly to a production class in the Screen Arts and Cultures department. Our goal is to help dedicated, creative students create their own passion projects.
Who: Students like you (possibly) and me, who worked on independent movie projects the past two semesters. They are presenting the fruits of their labor on the big screen for one night only.
Where: The Michigan Theater
When: April 9th at 7:30
Cost: FREE!
There are a wide variety of films this year, from documentary, to narrative, to straight avant-garde.
The Lightworks Festival is a showcase of Screen Arts & Cultures’ student films. Presented by SAC’s student organization FVSA (Film and Video Student Association), the Lightworks Festival is the venue for students to present their end-of-the-year production coursework to classmates, family, and friends of Screen Arts.
