The University of Georgia’s Backlight Student Film Festival is returning, screening work from student filmmakers from all over the state March 28-29.
Twelve films will screen at this year’s festival, which will be held at the Morton Theatre and the event venue Live Wire Athens, including UGA’s own Taylor Shults, whose film “Made With Love” will be competing in the short form category. The film follows a girl who’s determined to expand the palate of one person in her book club who only likes bland food.
Shults, who graduated from UGA last year, said that “Made With Love” came from a personal struggle with feelings of inadequacy and a constant need to prove herself. She fell in love with cooking when she was a little kid, and the film explores the expectations that come along with becoming good at something at a young age, with humor baked in at every turn.
“Cooking should be a thing where you are nourishing another person. When you cook for other people, it’s an act of love,” Shults said. “But for me, it became a selfish act where I was looking for specific responses. I eventually realized while I was trying to host parties in college, I’m doing all this because I like the praise, not because I want to do this for other people.”
Shults made the film for her senior year directing class, but she’d known about Backlight since she was a freshman. The festival has had a particular impact on her, and not just on her love of filmmaking. She met her boyfriend of three years through the festival – the first set she ever worked on was for his film.
“Backlight is probably one of the most impactful things on my life,” she said.
Filmmaker Brianna Barros is in her first year of graduate school at UGA, but made her short film “Countdown” when she was at Kennesaw State University. Her love of filmmaking began just before her freshman year of college when she was a background extra on the movie “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”
“I’d never seen how movies were made before that,” Barros said. “It was such a fun experience. I was like, whoa! This is really cool. I didn’t know all this happened in Atlanta. I didn’t realize this was a career that I could go into.”
When she started at KSU, a friend invited her to the film club For Film’s Sake, and she spent the next four years cutting her teeth on the sets of short films.
“I jumped onto every single project that they did, because I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” she said. “I just knew that I wanted to be on set.”
While she prefers to spend her time producing or assistant directing, she will write or direct every now and again, such as with “Countdown,” which was her senior capstone project. The film follows a few New Year’s Eve parties in the lives of one couple, tracking how their relationship changes.
Barros said the idea came to her as she was thinking about her four years of college and thinking about how much had changed in her life. She would look at Snapchat memories from years ago and think about how much her hair had changed, or how she wasn’t friends with the people in those pictures anymore.
“Things change in our lives. People come in and out of our lives,” she said. “But I don’t think we realize just how drastic some of the changes in our lives can be, just because we live every single day, one day at a time. Change happens slowly as you live it.”
Instead of focusing on the same night throughout the years, Savannah College of Art and Design graduate Juan Sebastian de Lima focused on a singular moment in time. His film “They Were Buying Us Drinks” follows three friends during a night out where jealousy and envy turn the evening on its head.
Like Barros, de Lima made his film for his senior capstone project. He originally had a different idea, but it wasn’t really working. When he changed the idea to what would become “They Were Buying Us Drinks,” he said he still thought that most of his peers found the story too simple to fill an entire short film.
“I think that’s key in films. You have to have a simple story,” he said. “I mean, you can make it as intricate as you want, but the simpler the story, the better.”
Since the story was so simple, de Lima wanted to make sure that the dynamics between the three friends came across. He had a total of five rehearsals with the three actors.
“I knew who I was going to cast, so it was really easy to just get into the flow of it,” he said. “The first few times were a little bit janky. I needed to write a certain way for different characters, so maybe there were mistakes in the writing. [But] those first few sessions turned into faster and snappier sessions with better chemistry.”
De Lima, who is an international student from Colombia, said he is honored to be a part of Backlight.
“I’d gotten into smaller festivals, and then I see that this is a known Georgia festival, and then I get in,” he said. “It’s a different change of pace. It changes things. It makes it more real.”