Short films by Princeton undergraduate students Calvin Kenjiro Grover ’27 and Nivan Dhamija ’27 and recent Princeton alumnus Paige Morton ’25 have earned awards from the highly regarded Thomas Edison Film Festival.

Film still from “Nada Dari Langit – Notes From the Sky” by Calvin Kenjiro Grover ’27 and Nivan Dhamija ’27

Grover and Dhamija’s documentary film, Nada Dari Langit – Notes From the Sky, won a Director’s Choice Award. Between Then & Now, an animated documentary by Morton, won the “Made in NJ” Stellar Award from the Festival’s Student Filmmakers competition.

The Thomas Edison Film Festival (TEFF) is an international juried competition celebrating all genres and independent filmmakers across the globe. TEFF is an Academy Award® Qualifying Festival for animated and experimental shorts and a Canadian Screen Award Qualifying Festival, the only film festival in New Jersey to hold these designations.

Grover and Dhamija are both photographers and filmmakers. They met in 2022 while participating in Princeton’s Novogratz Bridge Year Program in Indonesia, during which they volunteered with local NGOs and studied Bahasa Indonesia, the nation’s official language. “Many of our activities and travels during our Bridge Year revealed a tension between the universalizing nation-building vision of Indonesia and the diverse regional traditions across the vast archipelago, and we wanted to render this tension visible,” notes Grover. Upon completing their Bridge Year, they determined to return to Indonesia to work on a larger project. Grover and Dhamija were able to do so after receiving a 2024-2025 Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) Undergraduate Fellowship to support a new film project that would build off their experiences in anthropology, astronomy, and visual arts classes at Princeton. Grover is a Practice of Art major in the Department of Art & Archaeology and a minor in journalism; Dhamija is majoring in Anthropology with a visual arts minor. “We decided to do this by using the field of astronomy, specifically light pollution, and the emerging field of ‘ethnoastronomy,’ partially due to my interest in astrophotography, which I frequently practiced during Bridge Year,” Grover explains.

Nada Dari Langit – Notes From the Sky explores the astronomical traditions across Indonesia’s diverse archipelago. As light pollution interferes with Indonesia’s observatories, interest in ancestral ways of reading the stars re-emerges — where colonial science and indigenous cosmologies trace competing maps of the sky. Grover and Dhamija presented the film on the University campus last April in a screening hosted by PIIRS.

Morton, who graduated in June with a degree in the Practice of Art track from the Department of Art & Archaeology, created her film as her senior thesis. Interested in coming of age stories, Morton was inspired by her own experience of having to say goodbye to the home she grew up in. In an interview with Kirstin Ohrt, Morton explained, “My childhood home is going to be sold in the fall, so I was thinking about my last summers and Christmases and all my last moments in my house and how it’s kind of lining up with me graduating too. Saying goodbye to my childhood in a movie was something I was interested in doing.”

Between Then & Now is set on the eve of goodbye, as a girl wanders through her childhood home one last time and is caught between memory and the pull of the future. Morton is the only character, portrayed through animation with voice-over narration, and the film set is a dollhouse that Morton decorated with miniatures to replicate the interior of her childhood home.

Watch: Between Then & Now by Paige Morton

A girl recounts the last time she walked through her childhood home in the film Between Then & Now by Paige Morton.

For more than 40 years, the Thomas Edison Film Festival has been advancing the unique creativity and power of the short film by celebrating stories that shine a light on issues and struggles within contemporary society. Founded in 1981 as the Black Maria Film Festival and originally named for Thomas Edison’s West Orange, New Jersey, film studio, the festival was renamed in 2021 in recognition of Thomas Edison’s invention of the motion camera and the kinetoscope and his experimentation with the short film that inspired the festival’s origins.