Students in the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Visual Arts will present new work in a film and video screening. On Thursday, May 15, at 4:00 p.m. over thirty students from four different spring courses in film and video production will present new short films and videos completed during the past semester. The screening will take place in the James M. Stewart ’32 Theater at 185 Nassau Street followed by a reception. The event is free and open to the public.
The screening will feature short, narrative films created in “Narrative Filmmaking,” a studio course taught by Lecturer in Visual Arts and filmmaker Emily Abt. Over the duration of the semester, Abt’s students brought original scripts to life in collaboration with actors and production crews. The screening will also include videos from digital video production courses taught by Lecturer in Visual Arts Keith Sanborn and Professor in Visual Arts Su Friedrich. Sanborn’s “Introductory Film and Video Production” course introduced students to the techniques of shooting and editing digital video, while Friedrich’s advanced production class focused on digital media production along with issues of writing, editing, aesthetic choice and challenging one’s audience. Digital videos created in Friedrich’s “Documentary Filmmaking” course will also be shown.
Abt, who began teaching at Princeton in 2009, was selected as one of Variety magazine’s “Top 10 Directors to Watch,” and is an award-winning filmmaker dedicated to creating fiction and documentary projects with social-issue themes. She has produced documentaries for Showtime, PBS, the OWN Network, MTV and the Sundance Channel. Recent narrative projects include True To The Game, a screen adaptation she penned based on The New York Times bestseller and Audrey’s Run, a political thriller starring Paula Patton that Abt wrote and will direct.
Sanborn, a media artist, theorist, curator and translator, began teaching at Princeton in 2002. He is a regular contributor to festivals such as OVNI (Barcelona), the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Oberhausen Film Festival, and his work has been included in two Whitney Museum of American Art biennials. His theoretical and critical writings have appeared in contexts ranging from Artforum to Kunst nach Ground Zero to exhibition catalogues for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the San Francisco Cinematheque.
Friedrich, who has been teaching at Princeton since 1998, has produced and directed twenty films and videos, which have won awards at festivals all over the world. Her work is widely screened in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and has been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival, among others. Her recent film, Gut Renovation, received its international premiere last year at the Berlin Film Festival. Barring one exception, Friedrich is the writer, director, cinematographer, sound recordist, and editor of all her films.
Featured student filmmakers include Sherene Agama ’14, Danielle Allen ’16, Pelin Asa ’16, Sara Bojo ’14, Michael Cummings ’14, Susan Farrell ’17, Clare Gallagher ’14, Darcy Hargadon ’15, Lucas Ho ’14, Cameron Johanning ’16, Gerson Leiva ’16, Charlotte Levy ’14, Steven Li ’16, Fabian Lindfield Roberts ’17, Toan Lu ’17, Allan Marube ’16, Emma Michalak ’17, Virginia Midkiff ’16, Olivia Nice ’14, Aisha Oxley ’16, Christian Perry ’16, Pat Rooney ’17, Whitney Sha ’17, Ambikah Singh ’15, Colleen Smith ’14, Christian Smutherman ’14, Matthew Soursourian, Jeffrey Stapleton ’14, Joseph Sung ’15, Gabbie Watts ’14, Jeff Williamson ’17, and Geneva Wright ’14.
