The annual festival returned to the Lorton Performance Center, honoring film students new and old with a showcase of films that emphasized the power of music.
The University of Tulsa’s film department held its annual Fall Film Festival this Friday, Nov. 6, in the Gussman Concert Hall at the Lorton Performance Center. The program included nine films selected by the department’s faculty, each sharing the theme of music. In keeping with this theme, the festival’s organizers aimed to highlight not only the directors of the films, but their composers as well, signifying the often-overlooked importance of a scoring on film projects.
The pictures that screened at the festival represented a broad range of talent from across the department’s history. The first film shown, the intimate drama “Forgery,” premiered at TU’s Spring Film Festival in 2014. It was directed by Isaac Holton, a film studies alumnus and longtime LPC employee, who was one of many laid off from the university in October. Film studies professor Jeff Van Hanken gave a tribute to Holton before the screening. The last film shown, “The Musical,” was an equally appropriate bookend. Directed by Drew and Alex Allen, it was the only true musical shown, featuring several original songs. It was also the most recent film from the university to be selected by the Student Academy Awards as a regional semifinalist. Another film, the uplifting comedy “Door to Door,” which premiered in 2011, featured alumnus Keith Daniels in an acting role. Daniels has since become an award-winning filmmaker whose most recent documentary, “Fighting More than Fire,” screened at Tulsa’s Circle Cinema this year.
While the festival celebrated the contributions of alumni, several current students were also honored, with their work being represented in five of the nine films that screened. These films spanned a variety of genres, including horror, romance, psychological thriller and documentary. Glenn Gutierrez’s thriller “Caged,” used its score to support emotionally powerful narrative moments, while Isaac Castleberry’s “Memento” focused on the creative process of music. The communal nature of musical performance was highlighted in Charlie Edwards’ “Sunscreen Hotdog” and Tony Scardino’s “The Most Important Meal of the Day” showcased music’s ability to shape a narrative by abstaining from dialogue entirely. Several films combined genres of either film or music, including Betty Lam’s “Wanderers,” which incorporated horror elements into a compelling family drama, or Reese Wood’s “Rock and a Hard Place,” a romance influenced by jazz that — true to its title — introduces a comedic punk-rock twist.
As highlighted on the festival’s bulletin, the festival could not have been a success if not for the contributions of the film studies department faculty, including professors Van Hanken, Alican Çamci, Jennifer Jones and Joshua Lowery, as well as the department’s film techs, students Jess Grimes and Joey Turley-Wilson, and the LPC’s staff. Jones, who selected the festival’s musical theme, described the importance of film festivals as “not just about seeing work” but also “gathering a community and making connections.” Current film studies senior Tony Scardino stressed these dual purposes, explaining how his work being shown on the big screen to a large audience allowed him to realize “the end goal … as a filmmaker” while connecting him with other filmmakers and “[showing] him what’s capable” through their work. Ultimately, he stated, the work of other film studies students, especially alumni, is a “foundation for us that we can follow … and make all of our projects better than we expect them to be.”
