Festival Eau Cinema
campus filmmaking contest turns to documentaries
Over the past decade Eau Claire has been noted for having a booming arts scene. UW-Eau Claire (as well as other people and entities) has dedicated itself to making the Confluence Project happen, promoting the arts even more in the community. With that being said, the coming year could be monumental in Eau Claire and the University Activities Commission’s Film Committee wants to contribute to that greatly.
While for the greater part of the last decade Eau Claire has hosted the “48 Hour Film Festival” during the fall semester, in February the UAC Film Committee will be putting on a second film festival. Last March they held “The 31 Day Video Project: Aesop’s Fables,” which was wildly successful. “I believe we had 31 submissions total for the screening!” says Brodie Haenke, committee chairperson. Each contestant had the entire month of March to create a 10-minute short film adapting a randomly assigned Aesop fable; however, this year is slightly different.
“We like to keep our projects as open-ended as possible to encourage creativity and originality. Making a documentary gives the filmmaker a chance to really focus in on their own interests.” – Brodie Haenke, UAC Film Committee chairperson, on the Festival Eau Cinema
The film committee did some slight re-branding and changed the name from “The 31 Day Film Project” to “Festival Eau Cinema,” which Haenke says likely will be the name for quite some time. They also changed the month of the festival to avoid having it coincide with spring break, which Haenke believed was a factor in who participated.
Starting at 6pm Friday, Jan. 31, participants – who can be UWEC students or community members – will be able to sign up for the festival by the Woodland Theater in the Davies Center. At 12:01am the next morning, contestants will receive a confirmation email that will include a required line of dialogue as well as a required article of clothing that must appear at some point in the film. All of the contestant’s films must be submitted by midnight on Friday, Feb. 28.
Another change that the committee made is the genre of the short films. This year they strayed away from fables and decided to go with documentaries. “(We) chose documentaries because we thought it would be a great way to involve new filmmakers from diverse backgrounds,” Haenke says. “We like to keep our projects as open-ended as possible to encourage creativity and originality. Making a documentary gives the filmmaker a chance to really focus in on their own interests.”
The films will be screened Friday, March 7, which an awards ceremony following. While Haenke says one of the categories would be “Best Film,” he is playing the other categories close to the chest. “We don’t like to release what the other awards will be so that filmmakers simply focus on doing their best rather than trying to please judges,” he says.
As if the excitement hadn’t mounted enough already, after the award ceremony the committee will screen Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a documentary revolving around world-renowned sushi master Jiro Ono and his sushi restaurant. But the festival really culminates a few days later when Mike Manning, star of The Real World DC and co-producer of Kidnapped, a documentary film about controversial behavior modification methods used at an evangelical Christian reform school, does an interview session hosted by the film committee in the Schofield Auditorium on Thursday, March 13.
With excitement mounting for the festival, 2014 is sure to start out with bang (or whatever sound a movie reel makes).
To learn more about the festival, check out www.facebook.com/uac.uwec or email haenkebj@uwec.edu.
