COM Students Take Top Prizes at Student Media Summit Pitch Fest

COM students Joaquin Garcia Torres (COM’26) and Olive Cantor (COM’26) earned top awards at last month’s Pitch Fest at the Massachusetts Production Coalition (MPC) Student Media Summit.

Students from Emerson College, Bentley University, Tufts University, Northeastern University and other Boston area colleges also attended the event, held at Endicott College in Beverly.

“Of the four years we’ve held the Student Media Summit, it is the first time BU has taken both prizes,” said MPC Executive Director David Hartman.

The summit featured a career panel with recent college graduates, a networking session for students looking for collaborators and crew for their films, and the Pitch Fest, a contest judged by a professional panel. Students were allowed two minutes to pitch their short film to the panel, with $1,000 and $500 cash prizes awarded to the top two pitches.

“The Pitch Fest was a very interesting event, and a great chance to meet other students from other universities that had amazing stories,” said Garcia.

Cantor, a film and television major, won second place for a pitch she had developed in Assistant Professor Gustavo Rosa’s Production II class. Garcia, who won first place, is in his first year in the Screenwriting masters program and was awarded for a short film he developed in Assistant Professor Marni Zelnick’s class.

Garcia says his film is about “aging in the context of immigration” and takes place in a single afternoon. In the film, two sisters revisiting their home country to see their grandmother are confronted by her age and struggle to “remain the force of life that she always was,” Garcia adds.

Garcia, an international student from Ecuador, developed this story and pitch in Zelnick’s Writing the Social Purpose Short class. Zelnick initially encouraged him to participate in the event, he said.

“In our program and in [Professor Zelnick’s] class we are encouraged to write stories that matter to us, and to get out work ready for competitions and festivals,” said Garcia. “This award encourages me to keep working on this and other stories I’m interested in developing.”