Williston’s recent Film Festival was a wonderful showcase of the wealth of creative talent on campus.

The Williston Film Festival is an annual film showcase that features not only Williston films, but also films from all over the country and abroad. The festival was founded in 2009 by Rafael Cortina, a 2009 Williston alum who later on won a Student Academy Award for film, and the event has since received a growing number of submissions and volunteers every year. 

This year, the amount of submissions almost broke the all-time record: 83, justthree3 away from the 86 submissions Film Club received last year. Featuring films from all over the country, like New York, D.C., Texas, and international films such as one from Kuala Lumpur, the film festival upheaved a massive uproar this year.

Grace McCullagh, senior and Co-President of Film Club, attributes part of the success to a film outreach program that the club joined recently. 

“In the past couple years, we branched out into a program called the film freeway that allows us to get submissions from anyone and anywhere, which drastically increased our numbers,” she said. “Last year we broke the record for our submissions with 86 submissions, and we had stuff all over the world like Ukraine.”

Aster Carlstrom, senior and Production Assistant of Film Club, said there was a higher attendance amongst Williston students at the festival this year.

“There was a huge turnout, partially thanks to art teachers making it a requirement for their students to attend,” he said. “There was a lot more audience participation than usual, as well as a lot more Williston films. People in the audience can connect to that.”

The festival lasted for an hour and a half.

River Hambleton, sophomore and member of Film Club, helped with the film selection process.

“We watch every one of the films and, as a group, we agree to a collection of 15 to 20 of them that can’t go over an hour and a half,” he said.

The films that were showcased spanned a variety of themes and subject matter.

“We like to have diverse genres, not just documentaries or comedies or horror films but a whole variety of different subjects,” he said. “We also look at how different shots are composed and how the audio is mixed.”

With the diversity in the type of film, there are many different awards that a film can win: Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Acting, Best Editing, Most Creative, and Audience Choice Award, which senior Ava Howard won with her outstanding film, “Splat”.

At the end of the film showcase, there was a tribute video to Edward Hing, photographer and arts teacher at Williston, who is retiring after this school year.

“This is the last Williston film festival Mr. Hing will attend,” Grace said. “He’s retiring this year, so we made a tribute video for him at the end. It was pretty emotional since he was the teacher that helped establish the first film fest.”

There were some challenges during the event. Grace said that it took more than 80 hours to organize the whole festival. One particular challenge was having technical difficulties with the slide show of films.

“As the person who was pressing the button on the slideshow, we didn’t have a lot of time to prepare because we weren’t expecting this many submissions, so we didn’t have a dress rehearsal,” Aster said.

River also agrees that the sheer amount of submissions this year has significantly increased their work load in preparation for the festival.

“We had to narrow down the films a lot,” he said. “There was one film that we all loved but it was eight minutes and that just took up too much time.”

There were so many films that some of them were even repetitive in content.

“I think there were three nun films,” Aster said. “We said if a nun did a backflip then we would let it in the festival, but that never happened.”

Aster has concerns on how Film Club will keep up in the future, given most members are seniors and are about to graduate.

“We are really low on members next year, so we need to start advertising for more people to join,” he said.

Having joined halfway through sophomore year, Film Club has helped Grace become the artist she is today.

“I use the club to practice my communications and digital media skills. I handle advertising events and getting our work out into the community,” she said.

Film Club hosts their meetings every Thursday at 6:15 P.M. in the photo lab, and anyone who is interested is welcome to join.

“It’s important for people to see the diaspora of film,” Grace said. “ hope people learned something at the film fest. The film program has taught me so much and I want other people to feel the same way.”