Tales of moral dilemmas in the ice rink, secrets in the church, and more dynamic stories make up this year’s nominees for The Redstone Film Festival.

Students, friends, and family will come together on April 26 at 7 p.m. at the Tsai Performance Center to watch the annual showcase and award ceremony of COM student films.

“This year’s finalists are testimony to the impressive range of storytelling and quality of our student work,” says Film and Television Department Chair Paul Schneider.

Undergraduate and graduate students in the Department of Film and Television have competed in this festival, recognized as a premier venue for film projects in New England.

The awards are sponsored by Canon and the Sumner M. Redstone Charitable Foundation. 

Six films made the cut as finalists and will compete for awards in seven categories:

• Best Film
• Best Actor
• Best Cinematography
• Best Screenplay
• Best Editing
• Best Sound Design
• Best Production Design (new this year)

The films are: Bob, Forgive Me Father, Lock Jaw, Pas De Deux, Runner’s Blood, and The Notice.

Bob follows a young Chinese immigrant boy who feels abandoned when his mother wants to enroll him in boarding school, creating cultural and familial challenges in this drama written and directed by Tianyu Du (COM ’24).

Secrets about a bishop unfold when a young priest, who confided in the bishop, struggles with his desire to leave the church, in the drama Forgive Me Father, written and directed by Niccola Civita (COM ’24).

Lock Jaw, written and directed by Nina Barresi (COM ’23), follows a woman participating in a drastic weight loss study who struggles to break free from the overwhelming pressure of normalized beauty standards. 

An elite figure skater faces a moral dilemma after he’s caught using performance drugs, in Shayna Smith’s (COM ’24) thriller Pas De Deux.

Runner’s Blood, is Leo Yana Romero’s (COM ’25) drama about a delusional athlete, obsessed with perfection, who uses disturbing methods to outcompete another runner.

A man down on his luck tries to commit a robbery in The Notice, written and directed by Yelisey Kazakevich (COM ’25).

Eleven films were also nominated for the Fleder-Rosenberg Feature and Short Film screenplay contests, sponsored by COM alumni Gary Fleder and Scott Rosenberg.

For short screenplay: Answer Key by Brian Thompson, Desired by Angel Vincent, The Big Catch by Andrew Bae, Koshgelam by Sifr Dimachkie, On The Right Track by Chantel Kardous, Grandmaster Dad by Blake Ung, and Taper by Ben Locke.

For feature screenplay: Alchemist Garden by Tia Samaha, Before the Lamb by Lily Hill, Bias by Ben Locke, The Cherry Harvest by Alexa Salimpour, Leather Beat by Sift Dimachkie, and Radicals by Owen Wesorick.

Additionally, nine finalists will compete for the new Sumner Redstone Television Pilot Contest in drama and comedy categories.

For drama: “The Earth Tremors Beneath My Feet: You are now entering the hood” by Cheyenne Smith, “In My Corner” by Hannah Garfield, “Lovely Rita’s” by Audrey Porter, “The Price of Angel Wings” by Robert “Amour” Felton, and “Seafarers” by Tori Merkle.

For comedy: “The Book of Charlotte” by Olivia Belluck, “Robotics Team” by Gabriel Whitney, “Strange Women” by Nell Ovitt, and “Wizzed” by Lydia Evans

Lindsay Gould and Xinkai Sun will also be honored as co-winners of the Film and Television Studies Award for Innovative Scholarship for their works, “Disney from Home: The Consumerist Spectacle of the Disney Episode” and “Madame Satã: Queer Disidentification and Performance,” respectively. 

You can RSVP through Eventbrite here.