The Leader

For all of the Union Theatre's eclectic, fascinating offerings, one event seems to go largely underappreciated every semester: the UWM Student Film & Video Festival. One would assume that, given UWM's relatively prestigious reputation as a low-key experimental film school, the festival would attract a bevy of students eager to see what's going on in the basement of Mitchell Hall. Not so, says festival member Katie Kildow: "Not enough students come. [There are] more people from the community, but [still] a lot of people from outside the film department don't know what goes on here."

What does go on in UWM's film department? The exciting thing is that that question is impossible to answer; obviously a diverse community of artists can't be unanimously represented by a single label, which is the ironic (perhaps detrimental) aspect of the Peck School of the Arts being branded as a strictly avant-garde program. "The festival brings in a variety of work," Kildow says. "Documentary, experimental, animation, narrative - it ranges from extremely experimental to experimental narratives to wholly narrative films."

Moving into its third decade, the Student Film & Video Festival is especially charming in its low-key conviviality. Although some of the films showcased in previous years' festivals have gone on to certain recognition and acclaim (since its premiere in 2004's festival, I've seen Eric Gerber's What Remains on five separate occasions in other venues), the festival really does seem like a group of like-minded cineastes sharing their work and responding to it. While some film festivals' shorts programs seem like an unconnected string of overzealous self-promotion, the Student Film & Video Festival seems, in spite of its diverse range of artistic viewpoints, styles, and influences, like it has its fingers on the pulse of UWM's filmmaking community.

For the second semester in a row, the festival also offers a photography exhibition in conjunction with the screening - last year the photographic selections were presented in the Union Art Gallery following the festival, but this year the festival's programmers hope to display them in the second-floor hallway leading to the Union Theatre. "Normally we lose a lot of people from the theatre to the art gallery," says Kildow, although the post-festival commiseration, in addition to allowing audience members and filmmakers to converse, replays some of the festival's selections, offering the audience an imperative second look.

A semester of limitless film and video making culminates in a single evening; months of aggravatingly, wonderfully hard work suddenly pays off as artistic labor transmutes into artistic expression (and audience reaction). Grades, degrees and coursework are the last things on students' minds; instead, the film program simply becomes about painting with light and movement, about using a white screen as a canvas. This is the night when we, both the filmmakers and the audience, forget about the school in "film school" and simply enjoy experiencing something entirely new in the darkness of the theatre.

The UWM Student Film & Video Festival screens Friday, May 12 at 7pm. Tickets are $4 for students and $5 for general admission.

Submissions for the festival are due May 5 in Mitchell B70. Students may submit one film and/or one video or, for the photography exhibition, three to five prints of any size.

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