Above photo: Students Amber Piazza, Matthew Bryant, Natalie Guerra and Branndon Baez accept a Jury Award for their film “Haunted Hallways.” Dylan Hart | The Crow’s Nest
By Dylan Hart
Just a day after the Academy Awards, USF St. Petersburg held a film ceremony of its own with the Campus Movie Fest premiere.
Campus Movie Fest, which touts itself as the largest student film festival in the world, provides students with equipment for a week in February to produce their own 5-minute film. The festival serves over 30 schools and has now concluded its third annual run at USF St. Petersburg.
Joseph Conte, a USF St. Petersburg alumnus, acted in the film “Blow Me Away” in addition to submitting his own film this year.
“This is my second year doing CMF,” said Conte. “It was set up nicely and it was a great presentation. I also thought it was great how inclusive they were with the sort of films they accepted.”
This year’s presentation featured a two-hour ceremony.
The festival rolled out the red carpet into the USC ballroom, providing food and giving out a number of prizes for attendance and audience participation, ranging from massage packages to high-end cameras.
Student filmmakers shattered the school record for participation this year by over 20, submitting 58 films for the festival.
While all 58 films are available online, only the top 16 films, which were chosen by anonymous judges, were shown at the school premiere. Out of those 16, the top four films were then selected to represent USF St. Petersburg at TERMINUS, the national-level competition in Atlanta.
This year’s four films that were presented with the Jury Award and an invitation to TERMINUS were “Christi,” a documentary by Kelli Marie Carmack featuring Colin Stanart, “a USFSP student by day and emerging drag queen by night”;
“Alone,” a somber, dramatic reflection on suicide by Felix Ali, Alexandra Guerrier, Yvayela Jeudy and Darnell Henderson;
“Haunted Hallways,” a comedic parody of ghost hunting shows by Matthew Bryant, Natalie Guerra, Amber Piazza, Branndon Baez and Paige Sharp, and:
“The Laundromat,” a surreal, genre-bending movie about a woman visiting a laundromat in her dreams by Courtney Odonoghue, Jesse Knafla, Drew Forret and Grayson Horsey.
Student Bella Beyer also won an award for Best Performance for her acting in the film “Somebody.”
The films that premiered varied widely in genre, scope and vision.
Several films, including “The Coloring Book” and “Where is Home” discussed student diversity on campus in an interview format, while documentaries such as “Booker Creek Investigation” and “How to Read a Creek” explored environmental issues.
The festival also showcased comedies such as “How to Make a Student Film,” suspenseful thrillers like the aforementioned “Somebody” and even the occasional music video, such as “My Pool Float Broke.”
