By Joseph Marasciullo
Staff Writer
The Cinema Guild recently held its second annual 48-Hour Film Festival, where students were challenged to produce and premiere a short film in only two days. These constraints led the single presenting group to create a very unique feature.
Sewanee’s 48-Hour Film Festival seeks to be an outlet for creative expression. It serves as an excuse for the actors, writers, and directors to have fun exploring the medium of film. In this regard, the film presented at the showing was a true success.
Brant Lewis’s (C’19) In the Life Of was the only film presented to the audience during the film festival. The story follows college professor Dr. Sanders, played by Krystal Fowler (C’19), through a day in her life in which she is set upon by two forces.
First are her students, who exhibit a wide range of interest and disinterest, and second is an enthusiastic Febreeze salesman, played by Lewis. Students Barb, played by Katie Ray (C’21), and Doug, played by Sydnee Everhart (C’21), then proceed to disrupt the class so much that the documentary crew decides to film them instead.
Produced in only two days, the film wasn’t really open to deep interpretation. Lewis, however, did humor the questions regarding the overall nature and themes of the film, saying that a major theme of the film was the “routines we fall in during life.”
Lewis elaborated by saying that we manage to make life uninteresting by making it more methodical and understandable, yet at the same time we’re always faced with people who throw our lives into disarray, like the Febreeze salesman and Barb.
The event took place inside Blackman Auditorium, although the original venue was the Student Union Theatre. Though a second film was planned, the other group was unable to finish in time.
For the film that did show, a group of seven passionate students had to spend two full days attempting to make just 10 minutes of film. No matter what came up on the screen, it was a creative triumph, and that’s what the 48-Hour Film Festival is really about: creativity and self-expression.
Before rolling the oversized projector screen backup, Lewis spoke to the real nature of the festival, saying outright that his production was “not very serious, [but] instead it’s about flexing creative muscles and creating without fear of judgement.”
