Harvard’s Cannes?

The Crimson Key Society, in conjunction with the Office of the Arts (OFA) and Apple Computers, will host its first-ever student film festival on Thursday, May 3. The Crimson Film Festival will showcase six student-produced films, ranging from documentaries to animation shorts, in an effort to bring several campus arts groups closer together.

Event planner and Crimson Key board member Nicholas A. Noyer ’09 explains why the group decided to try something new. Crimson Key’s usual duties consist of running freshman week events and giving special tours of the college.

“Crimson Key is involved in providing a lot of services for the campus, but we realized we have yet to extend our involvement into the arts community,” he says.

Several others Crimson Key members have been involved in planning the festival besides Noyer. Board members Monique A. Wilson ’09 and Timur Kalimov ’09 helped in the early planning and logistics. Jack Megan of the OFA and Harvard College Associate Dean Paul J. McLoughlin also worked to help make the event a reality.

“We saw that something was lacking. There wasn’t a place to appreciate other students’ work in the cinematic arts. It’s an important step for the arts community, and we’re very happy that the OFA and Dean McLoughlin have worked hard to make this a reality,” Noyer says.

The event is free for students, though tickets are still required and may be picked up at the Harvard Box Office. Non-Harvard affiliates will have to foot five dollars for the show.

“This is an event that’s really just for students,” says Noyer. “We charged money in order to dissuade outsiders, to create more room for students.” If you plan on going, make sure to get your ticket ahead of time—there are only 140 seats in Boylston’s Fong Auditorium.

“Originally we wanted to have a competition,” says Noyer of the festival. Groups of students would have had five days to make a film, and the winner would have taken home big prizes. The plan changed, however, when event sponsor Apple Computers decided to “reallocate” some of the prize funding. Winners will now receive iPods and iTunes gift cards.

The two hour event will showcase six student films. The films will be screened back to back, followed by a question and answer session with each filmmaker, before the judges select a winner. Organizers say that the unique conversation set-up aspires to bring the student art community closer together and allow the contributors to get feedback about their own films.

As it stands, the six contributors slated to show films at the festival include Alexa J. Bush ’07, George T. Olken ’07, Vanessa A. Pope ’07, Richard E. Ruiz ’07, Travis R. Wood ’07, and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student Helene Landemore.

Bush submitted a short animation project titled “Animal Tales.”

“I shot it in Sever. The project uses a lot of different media, crayon, paint, newspaper, cutouts, photographs,” she says. “It’s a comic, fairytale piece about two animals that are friends and go off on an adventure across the sea.”

Olken entered a fictional piece titled “There Will Be Time,” which stars Nathan J. Dern ’07 of “Beauty and the Geek” fame, who is also Olken’s roommate. “It is about experiencing simultaneous contradictory emotions and the stress an accident puts on a relationship,” Olken says.

The Crimson Film Festival will take place on next Thursday, May 3rd at 8 p.m. in Boylston Hall’s Fong Auditorium.

Visual and Enviornmental Studies concentrator Pope says she entered her film “How I Became a Cat Person” to get more feedback on the piece, which is also her senior thesis.

The movie, a documentary highlighting her most recent stay in France, mixes personal experience and candid observation. An animal rights advocate, she dedicated the piece to “all animals living in cities, cages, and factory farms.”

She says she hopes the discussions will give her what she needs to put the finishing touches on her final film as an undergraduate.

According to Pope, entering the festival had other benefits as well.

“Why not? I need a job in film.”