Dustin Grella looked out over an overflow audience Saturday night at Trustees Theater and dared a confession: This wasn't what he expected.
Grella had just been named winner of best student animation on the closing night of the 13th annual Savannah Film Festival. A pretty young lady had given him a statue and posed for pictures with him as flashbulbs blinked.
"I was expecting a little tiny, animated film festival, and I was just wrong," he said. "There are celebrities and fancy people."
Far into the upper balcony, almost in the last row, Savannah paralegal Jennifer Ramsey and her friend, Elizabeth Schindo, were equally appreciative.
"It just gets more exciting every year," Ramsey said of the event, sponsored by Savannah College of Art and Design. "There are bigger and better films, and it seems as if SCAD is accommodating it all. The crowds get bigger every year, but they handle it."
Even before the curtain raised Saturday night on "127 Hours," the festival's final film, organizers knew they had a hit on their hands.
Attendance at the eight-day event exceeded 42,000 - the total for last year's event - and that was before hundreds of people lined up outside the Broughton Street theater for the final film. The line stretched around the corner to Slicer's Deli on Abercorn.
The film festival awarded top films by SCAD students and professionals. David Karlak took two top honors for "The Candidate" - best SCAD Student Film and the 2010 HBO Best Student Competition Award, which includes a $5,000 cash prize.
The festival also recognized high-school talent with its SCAD Challenge. Students from six countries and 15 states competed.
Ask Danny Filson, the festival's executive director, to pick the moment that best captures what the Savannah Film Festival is all about, and he volunteers three.
The festival, he explains, is about more than any one film or the experience a local audience gets from sneak-previewing award-winning films before their release date.
It's also about giving SCAD film students the opportunity to talk one-on-one with producers, directors and actors.
Among them were Ian McKellan, who this year taught a master's class in acting.
More than 200 film and industry professionals came to the festival to lead workshops, drop in on SCAD classes and talk films.
"The number of professionals that came to me that said 'I'd hire that student right now. Let me know when he or she graduates.' That's really why we do the festival, to put our students in front of the film professionals," Filson said.
For students like Ian Bostick, Keisha Douglas and Hillary Block, the festival was a living classroom, a place to see films of every genre, talk to professionals and consider career options.
At one screening, Douglas talked to a friend of the film's director and mentioned she was heading to New York to try to make it in the industry there. She got a business card and suggestions on a few places to start a job inquiry.
Filson also recalls watching actor Liam Neeson take so much time to talk to students and audience members from the stage of The Lucas Theater and seeing him genuinely affected by their appreciation.
"There's a huge difference from our Savannah audience," Filson said. "He expected people to applaud but ... to have 1,100 people roar and come standing to their feet, it took him aback to see an audience that warm, that gracious and that enthusiastic."
No comments:
Post a Comment