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Page C-4 Montclair Film Festival Thursday, April 27, 2017 Short lms set to light up festival
by GWEN OREL orel@montclairlocal.news
A short lm isn’t just an excerpt.
Dan Schoenbrun, who programmed the short lms in the Montclair Film Festival, compares short lms to short stories. They both must tell a compel- ling story with limited real estate and time: “You need to get speci c, and craft something that’s resonant, with very lit- tle space.”
This year Montclair Film Festival of- fers 57 short lms, out of over 400 sub- mitted, Schoenbrun said.
The lms are divided into blocks: Documentary Shorts, Dream Shorts, Fiction Shorts, Lunafest Showcase ( lms by and about women), New Jersey Shorts, Montclair Shorts, MSU Shorts, Shorts for All Ages, Student Shorts, and True or False? The Lure of the False Nar- rative (a collection of shorts). There are also shorts shown before features.
One major change this year is the in- clusion of a Montclair-speci c block in addition to New Jersey shorts. A Mont- clair lmmaker could be eligible for ei- ther: Montclairite Wes Jones’ “Cat Killer”
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ming for the Film Institute at Montclair State University. “Bake Sale” is part of her digital series “Breeding Grounds,” in which every episode has a scene struc- tured around pickup time at school. For Schoenbrun, the shorts program is rich this year. He is particularly excit- ed by “Shorts for All Ages,” which are “incredibly energetic and empathetic stories. ‘Dream Shorts’ is surreal and strange and should only be watched at night. ‘Great Choice’ has a woman who gets trapped inside a Red Lobster com- mercial from the 1990s.” He noted that “Great Choice” was a late addition, not listed in the catalog. “Fiction Shorts are really great this year,” Schoenbrun said. “‘American Paradise’ is social satire in the vein of the Coen brothers. ‘Fry Day’ has such an elegance in the way it tells its story.”
And “Cowtown,” about the oldest weekly rodeo in the United States of America, is one of Schoenbrun’s favor- ites. “It reveals a part of New Jersey I cer- tainly didn’t know about.” It was one of the rst ones Schoenbrun saw, he said, and when he did, he knew “this will be a good year for New Jersey shorts.”
Cowtown, New Jersey, holds the nation’s oldest weekly rodeo.
is in New Jersey shorts.
Jones’ is a lmmaking family; his
15-year-old daughter, Lily, has a winning short lm in the Emerging Filmmak- er Competition. Father and daughter’s lms both feature the Montclair actor Daniel London.
Susan Skoog and Liz Samuel are both Montclair lmmakers who have lms about Montclair moms in the Montclair
Shorts block. Samuels’ “MOMtress” por- trays a Montclair mom going on an audi- tion and trying to balance ambition with parenting and grief. She also stars in the lm.
The two women in Susan Skoog’s “Bake Sale” are Montclair moms too. The lm explores passive-aggressive behavior in women of di erent classes, said Skoog, who is director of program-
Young lmmakers say ‘Action!’
Emerging Filmmaker Competition
by ERIN ROLL roll@montclairlocal.news
The Montclair Film Festival includes a chance for young lmmakers in New Jer- sey and beyond to shine.
Each year, the festival o ers the Emerging Filmmakers competition for students in fourth grade through their senior year of high school.
The competition has three levels: “Cin- emaniacs,” for grades four through six, “Storytellers,” for grades seven through nine, and “Visionaries,” for grades 10 through 12.
“We got a lot of great submissions . . . really a range of submissions,” said Sue Hollenberg, the education director for the festival.
The majority of the 90 entries were in the Visionaries division, she said.
The festival announced this year’s winners in April. Of the 18 winning en- tries, ve were from students at schools in Montclair.
Besides the entrants, a panel of 15 lo- cal students served as the junior jury for the contest.
“Personal Space” brought home the grand prize for narrative lm. Aidan Champeau, the lm’s director, was part of a team of Montclair High School stu- dents. The rest of the crew included Lucia Ledesma, Jake Weinberg, Lilli Herrick, Jacob Manthy, Petra
the shoot had to be completed in some- one’s driveway.
Lily Jones, 15, is a freshman at Mont- clair Kimberley Academy. Her lm, “The Indubitable Molly Davis,” won the spe- cial jury prize for comedy, sharing that honor with “Planet of the Dogs” by MHS student Owen Plofker. “We lmed it all in like two weekends,” Jones recalled during
Winning lms, Saturday, April 29, 11 a.m. Wellmont Theater, 5 Seymour St.
She wasn’t expecting to be on-cam- era, so when she had to step in as one of the actors at the last moment, she didn’t have much time to memorize her lines. “I ended up having to re-shoot it, weeks later, after all the snow had melted,” she recalled.
Lily isn’t the only member of the Jones family with a lm about animals in the Montclair Film Festival; her father, Wesley Jones, has his own short lm, “Cat Killer,” in the main festival.
When asked what she hoped people took away from the lm, Jones said that she especially hoped it would make peo- ple think about the situation with high- kill animal shelters.
Fox and Jake Diamond. Champeau, 16, is a sophomore at MHS. “It’s basically a con- versation between two people,” Champeau said of the lm. “Are they going to like this movie that takes place in a car?” he wondered.
The lming didn’t go o completely without a hitch: the crew had set up lm- ing at Mills Reservation, only to have the police arrive and tell them that they were not allowed to lm there. So the rest of
a phone interview.
In the lm, Molly Davis wants to adopt a dog from a high-kill shelter. She sets out y- ers around town adver- tising her services as a babysitter. A wealthy family hires her to be
a sitter — for their pug. The lm is based a little bit on Jones’s own family life: the
starring pug is the Joneses’ own dog.
The idea for the movie came to her when she took the lm festival’s screen-
writing class earlier this year.
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