Who needs to descend on Park City, Utah for Sundance when we have a film festival right here on our campus? This past weekend, the Notre Dame Department of Film, Television, and Theatre presented the 37th Annual Notre Dame Student Film Festival. The festival offers FTT students an opportunity to showcase their filmmaking chops while revealing what preoccupies our next generation of filmmakers. And the preoccupations ran deep: phone addiction, fraught relationships with parents and Gen Z’s fear of romantic commitment. All of the films contained real talent and demonstrated that FTT is effectively incubating artists with creativity and bravery. Some personal highlights for me included the following:
“Stalk•er” by Derek Buckendorf and Ryan Broussard
The familiar concept of a stalker provides a strong springboard for this short film. The atmosphere is very eerie thanks to some stylish cinematography and strong shot compositions. The story carefully unfurls, revealing just enough information to intrigue and puzzle you. I loved the dark ending that hints at the film’s cycle repeating itself with another unsuspecting victim.
“Between Sentences” by Robin Sanders
Sanders mines her complex family issues for a richly personal documentary. She tells her story of navigating life with two fathers behind bars, one of whom was a member of the Marquette Park Four, wrongfully imprisoned for two decades before exoneration. It’s a powerfully authentic look at how mass incarceration fractures Black families and exacts a steep emotional toll on their children.
“Flicker” by Aidan Rush and Mike Holt
This one immediately hooked me with its opening dolly zoom of a character taking a pipe hit. The narrative structure is pretty clever: Our protagonist, a disheveled man addicted to drugs who lives on the streets, returns to his childhood home. As he touches the objects in the house, we’re treated to flashbacks of his life before his addiction It’s a clever little conceit that nicely builds to its emotional ending, where father and son reconcile.
“To Bea” by Luke Gil
A surreal comedy about the drudgery of the white-collar workplace that delivered plenty of laughs. Our protagonist, inspired by a zany coworker, tries to inject her menial office work with creativity and individuality, only to be shot down in brutal fashion. The direction was zippy and featured a great use of a SnorriCam.
“Worst Cast Scenario” by Micaela Kastor and Jack Oursler
We’ve all faced an upcoming event that instills such acute anxiety that visions of disastrous failure constantly plague your mind. This short film captures this painfully relatable scenario by exploring the absurd situations that a nervous actor imagines he might face in an audition. The short film deftly handles the various genres it hops around and has a cleverly winking ending.
“Dukneuse” by Ben Warren Flynn, Makena Mwathi and Brendan Nolte
The final short film of the night, this was a hilarious send-up of pharmaceutical ads. It perfectly captured the insidious nature of these ads, with their deceitful cheeriness and hidden side effects. The jokes per capita were almost as high as an episode of “Arrested Development”: blistering visual gags and absurdist humor abounded. It was also shot and edited incredibly well. It’s very fitting that the final film of the festival satirized the increasingly unreal nature of our world and how our most important institutions have become one big joke to young people.
