On Saturday, the Johns Hopkins Film Society screened a selection of student-made short films as part of the annual Johns Hopkins Film Festival. Its Baltimore Student Filmmaker Program featured a collection of films directed by local aspiring filmmakers. The contributors were largely college students with the notable exception of high school student Ruby Miller, who attends the Park School of Baltimore. This section is a new addition to the festival, now in its 22nd year.
The Film Festival began on Thursday, March 31 and continued until Sunday. The Festival’s first day consisted of a nighttime, 25 millimeter screening of Harold and Maude, a 1971 comedy directed by Hal Ashby. The second day featured a series of PowerPoint presentations given by Baltimorean film lovers and the release party for WAVEWAVE, the Film Society’s triannual zine.
The Baltimore Student Filmmaker Program took place on the third day of the festival as the first of the day’s three events. The student program was followed by the screening of short-form documentaries chosen from festival submissions and a full-length documentary, Waiting for John by Jessica Sherry.
Saturday’s showings were capped off with a presentation of Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides on 35 millimeter film.
It all concluded the next day following the screening of fiction shorts selected by the Film Society, which included a second feature documentary, The Flying Dutchmen, and finally a feature presentation of Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, again in the 35 millimeter format.
The Student Filmmaker Program featured ten films, three of which were directed by Hopkins students. The remaining seven filmmakers came from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Towson University, University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), the Park School of Baltimore and Grinnell College.
The films themselves were eclectic; Several languages were included, as were both live-action and animated shorts. Subjects ranged from the abstract to familial separation to post-apocalyptic survival.
The films were all exceptionally short, averaging no more than 10 minutes each. Each of the 10 presented was unique and compelling in its own right. The entries Throwing Up My Feelings All Over This TV, Indian Football, V’yanska and Potty Mouth directed by Aidan Spann of MICA, Ruby Miller of Park School, Liza Slutskaya of Hopkins and Hannah Geiger of UMBC, respectively, were defined by varying degrees of abstraction in their imagery and narratives.
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