Since its inaugural event in 2022, the Backlight Student Film Festival has been providing student filmmakers an outlet to share their work. This year is no different.
This year’s festival takes place March 29-30 at the Tate Theatre in Athens. The festival is free to attend and includes student film screenings, an industry panel, a red carpet, mixer, and an awards ceremony.
Eleven films will screen at this year’s festival, all made by students from schools like the University of Georgia, the Savannah College of Art and Design, and Columbus State University. In the mid-length film category, Georgia State University students Adam Beaumont and Molefe Sijiye will showcase their film “Date Night.”
Written by Sijiye and directed by Beaumont, who are both in their second year of college, “Date Night” is about a prom night pickup gone horribly wrong. Beaumont and Sijiye met in their first year after attending a GSU Film Club meeting and immediately decided they would like to work together one day.
When they finally decided to make the leap, Sijiye already had the idea for “Date Night” in mind. The film takes its tonal inspiration and sense of humor from the likes of sketch comedy.
“General anxieties in high school about taking girls out and stuff like that could have sprouted the idea on a subconscious level,” Sijiye said. “But really it was just throwing stuff at the wall. I was like, wouldn’t it be kind of funny? Wouldn’t this particular situation be kind of funny?”
The cast and crew, which was mostly made up of other GSU students, shot the film over three nights, working from roughly 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. Beaumont said that, as a first time director, he was both stressed and excited to take on that leadership role, and credited the crew with being game for anything.
“We’re very fortunate, really fortunate, to have a really dedicated team with us,” Beaumont said. “Everyone was on board. Everyone was having fun.”
In Backlight’s short form category this year, there are a slew of animated and live action movies ranging in themes and styles. One animated film, “Chocolate Retriever,” was written and directed by Paige Meakin, a third-year student at SCAD. “Chococlate Retriever” is a stop motion film about a dog who eats something it shouldn’t have, leaving its owner to fish it out of the dog’s mouth by whatever means possible.
The film is just one minute and 24 seconds long, but no matter the length, stop motion is a time-intensive medium. Meakin originally made the film for a class with about a team of nine other students working over about 10 weeks.
“I used to work in a dog boarding [company],” Meakin said. “I’d always have to be getting crap out of the dogs’ mouths all the time that they shouldn’t have had. So that’s kind of where my idea came from.”
Meakin not only worked as the writer and director of the project, but also as a fabricator and compositor. Fabricators build the puppets and sets used in the stop motion film, while compositors create the final image by making everything fit smoothly together.
“Animation really encompasses every facet of art in a way that I don’t think a lot of other creative industries do,” Meakin said.
On the hometown front, UGA student Isabel Bobrik is also competing in the short form program this year with her film “Wanderer.” “Wanderer” follows an older man named Gabriel struggling with dementia.
A fourth-year UGA student, Bobrik has known about Backlight for some time, but this is the first year she has been able to compete.
“I had submitted and had friends that had submitted films before, but this is the first time that I personally have been selected,” Bobrik said. “So that’s been really special and exciting.”
Bobrik decided to make “Wanderer” as a way to explore what it looks like to care for your loved ones as they age or become sick. The movie isn’t a direct correlation to her personal life, she said. However, she did pull from experience, as well as questions that she found herself asking about that experience.
“I looked in my own life at the attitudes that family and I have had growing up towards sick people in the family,” she said. “Sometimes, we don’t tell the person that they’re sick. Sometimes, the person is sick and doesn’t tell everybody else that they’re sick. Sometimes, we’re all in denial. Sometimes, everybody’s being completely, brutally honest. It made me wonder, in the sense of one day, I’m going to be older. One day, I’m going to be sick. Is my family going to be deciding if they should tell me or not? Do I even want to know?”
Actor Keith Hullet plays Gabriel in the film, and Lily Nelson plays his daughter, Kristen. Brobik said she lucked out finding both Hullett and Nelson – Hullett had been in Backlight student films in the past and had previously worked in the library at UGA. She found Nelson by posting the role on Backstage, an online casting service.
“She made time for this student production and trusted the script and me and the crew,” Brobik said. “It was such an honor to have Lily, and it was such an honor to have Keith as well.”
All four students said they are working on festival runs outside of Backlight.
“Thus far, we’ve met a ton of great people,” Beaumont said. “I really hope at Backlight that we’ll be able to talk extensively with all the people who made the other 10 films that are being shown.”
A full list of the films screening at the Backlight Student Film Festival can be found on the Backlight Student Film Festival’s website.
