Warning: These Films May Contain the Next Big Thing

The 28th annual Redstone Film Festival takes place on Wednesday, February 13, and includes six films on topics ranging from the solemn — the aftermath of an immigration raid in a New Bedford, Mass., factory — to the silly: a comedian who performs his stand-up routine entirely in the nude.

The festival, which showcases work by graduate and undergraduate Boston University students, is sponsored by Sumner Redstone (Hon.’94), CEO of Viacom. It begins at 7 p.m. at the Tsai Performance Center and is free and open to the public. Tickets are first-come, first-served, and are available at the Tsai Center box office starting at noon on Wednesday. Festival winners are chosen by a panel of prominent film industry professionals; cash prizes go to the first, second, and third place finishers.

BU Today spoke with this year’s festival finalists about the process of making their films. Click on the links below to watch the trailers.

New Bedford Stories, Jenny Alexander (COM’08)
On March 6, 2007, immigration officers raided a New Bedford, Mass., factory that makes vests and backpacks for the U.S. military. During the raid, 361 undocumented immigrants from Latin America, Portugal, and Cape Verde were arrested.

At the time, Alexander was following undocumented immigrant high school students who were trying to find a way to go to college; she planned to report on their struggle for her thesis project. In the ensuing weeks, however, these students turned their attention to a more pressing cause — locating the missing people arrested in the raid and their children left behind at day-care centers and school. “It became clear that these families’ stories needed to be told,” says Alexander.

New Bedford Stories tells those tales using several interviews that focus exclusively on the subjects’ eyes to preserve their anonymity. “Many of those who testified about the treatment they received were afraid Immigration would further punish them for testifying,” Alexander says. “It is amazing how expressive the eye and eyebrow can be.”

The film has already been featured at the Boston Latino International Film Festival, and Alexander hopes it can continue to be used by educational institutions and community organizations to make people aware of the impact of immigration raids on children and families.

A Tradition of Sound, Jessie Beers-Altman (COM’08)
Beers-Altman’s favorite piece of music as a young child was “Meditation” from Thaïs by composer Jules Massenet, so it’s not surprising that this classical music junkie features the piece in her documentary A Tradition of Sound, which focuses on the art of restoring antique violins.

Beers-Altman, who received an honorable mention at last year’s Redstone Festival in the Fleder-Rosenberg screenwriting contest, literally grew up surrounded by violins, and her mother, a Suzuki violin teacher, provided the film’s inspiration. “Last winter, I tagged along with my mom as she brought some of her instruments to a violin repair shop,” she says. “I was so awed by the beauty of the shop, I started asking a lot of questions about it.” Beers-Altman’s documentary takes place in the Boston shop, Reuning & Son Violins. “Most documentaries are shot on video,” Beers-Altman says. “But the dimly lit violin shop, with instruments from the 1700s, sort of lent itself to the medium of film. The footage was beautiful, and I was very pleased.”

Being Dead, Jeff Boedeker (COM’08)
After viewing Chris Marker’s seminal 1962 film La Jetée, constructed almost entirely out of black-and-white still photos, Boedeker was inspired. The film “changed my entire perception of how a story could be told,” he says, “and the possibilities of film as a language.”

Boedeker used this inspiration to create Being Dead, a film about a dying man who scans his own memories in an attempt to have his last one be about a woman.

The film production had challenges, including the location and timeline: a frozen bay in Boston, over a single weekend. “I got very little sleep,” he says, “but the film would not have been as successful if it weren’t for the conceptual mania I experienced.”

The Redstone is not Boedeker’s first festival. Last year, his film The Kite Club received a slot in Campus MovieFest, the world’s largest student film festival. His films have also appeared at festivals from Atlanta to Moscow. Recently, the Being Dead cast was reunited for Boedeker’s thesis film project, traveling to the Arctic Circle in Russia to shoot Silver Sunset, which will debut this summer.

More information about Boedeker’s projects is on his Web site.

Auscultare, Rosita Lama Muvdi (COM’08)
Auscultare is about a pregnant woman contemplating having an abortion. The story, however, is told from the perspective of the fetus. “The audience members are the fetus,” Muvdi says, “and they will experience the world as though they’re in the womb.”

An international student from Barranquilla, Colombia, Muvdi says she is most influenced by images around her — the spark of inspiration for Auscultare emerged when she saw a friend playfully swinging from a tree branch. “It was a simple and innocent image,” she says, “yet it sparked a whole set of ideas.”

She attributes the film’s experimental nature to Robert Arnold, a College of Communication associate professor of film and television, who taught her film production class. “The images are visual metaphors, from the pendulum-like quality of the swing set to the contrast between dark and bright images,” Muvdi says. “Every frame means something, and I hope the audience will experience the film in a way that they can respond to, even after the credits roll.”

Auscultare means “to listen” in Latin. “Latin is the root of everything,” Muvdi says, “just as a baby in a womb is the root of everything.”

Andy, Stacey Palmer (COM’08) and Jessie Beers-Altman (COM’08)
The only filmmaker with two films selected for the festival, Beers-Altman collaborated with classmate Palmer on her second entry. Andy is about a local stand-up comedian who happens to be a nudist.

Fratelli Breaks, Alex Scigliano (COM’07)
When he was in fifth grade, Scigliano’s mother started graduate school, leaving his father responsible for taking him and his older brother to church.

“One Sunday,” Scigliano says, “my Dad pulled a U-turn on the way and took us to a bar to teach us how to play pool.”

That back-room chalkdust education forms the core of Scigliano’s submission, Fratelli Breaks. The premise: two brothers reunite each year to play nine-ball for $10,000, in memory of their murdered father. Scigliano made the film with his older brother, Marcus. The siblings began tinkering with the project while Alex was still in high school. In Alex’s junior year at COM, he and Marcus started writing the script in earnest. Production began last February and took the brothers, their film equipment, and pool cues to East Boston, Logan Airport, Winthrop, Mass., and Allston, as well as Hoboken and Weehawken, N.J.

Click here to see more of the Scigliano brothers’ work.