Held on Friday, April 10 from 7 to 9:30 p.m., the first annual student film festival brought together a range of student work in a setting that felt both casual and intentional. While the event itself was relatively simple, the films and conversations around them reflected the amount of effort and experimentation that goes into student filmmaking. Rather than focusing on polished final products, the festival highlighted the process behind them, what works, what doesn’t, and how ideas change as they move from script to screen.
The festival was hosted as a collaborative effort between the School of Media and the Arts, LITS, BSG, and Marketing Club. While originally intended to be outdoors, the event was moved from the lawn of the library into the Impact Beloit classroom because of the cold.
The festival featured a collection of films from both current students and alumni. It opened with a panel from three student filmmakers, all of whom had films of their own shown that evening: Quentin Schane’26, Sivan Selvan’26, and Eduardo Alfaro’26. They talked about the films that they would be screening and answered questions from students about their experience, while also consistently offering extremely positive opinions of Joe Bookman.
The screening started 30 minutes into the event. Some of the films were shorter projects and scenes, a few minutes or shorter; others were longer, with the longest, Julian Cole’20’s “Thy Will Be Gone,” being around 20 minutes.
The very first film was Eduardo Alfaro’26’s comedy “All Expenses Paid Trip to the Bahamas,” starring Levi Hansen‘26 as Jim, a student in Professor Middleton’s (played by Frank Hooton‘26) economics class. Several people in attendance had acted in it as supporting characters, which made the watch much more entertaining.
Highlights from there on included a mix of short films that balanced humor, technical skill, and experimentation. Quentin Schane’26’s “Road House 3,” for example, featured a bar fight scene that was notably well-choreographed, showing a clear emphasis on planning and execution.
In contrast, Joe Bookman’s “Old Walls, New World: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Legacy at Beloit College,” had a more academic and reflective approach. The short documentary features Beloit faculty discussing Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed,” focusing on its themes of society, structure, and alternative ways of organizing the world. The film is driven by conversations, using faculty perspectives to break down the ideas of the novel and connect them to broader world problems.
Shorter projects also made up a significant portion of the festival, and while not all of them were as fully developed, they still showed the range of ideas students were working with. All together, the lineup made it clear that the festival was less about showcasing perfect films and more about presenting the different ways students are approaching the process of filmmaking.
At the end of the festival, three buckets of candy and stickers were raffled to anyone who had submitted a ticket with their name into the draw. So concluded the first — but hopefully not the last — time the student film festival has been held, with the potential of growing into a lively campus tradition.
Featured image: Quinn Annis’29
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