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The Second Annual University of Maine Student Film Festival was a celebration of the gritty, hilarious, shocking and entertaining wellspring of creativity that is independent film.
The Film Festival, held Thursday, April 25, in Donald P. Corbett Hall, featured four short films ranging between seven and 17 minutes, with numerous short skits in between. There was also an encore presentation of a longer film that appeared last semester at the first Student Film Festival, directed by the festival’s organizer Paul Ezzy.
Right from the start, before the films even began, the festival’s emphasis already appeared to be on comedy. While the audience drifted in and out during the half-hour before the festival was slated to begin, the screen cycled through a slideshow presentation satirizing the familiar “factoid” time-killer that plays in theaters before the movie starts.
This parody not only told trivia facts about the movies, but also parodied the insipid cinema time filler it imitated.
Although nearly all of the films, including the shorts, were great, the ones that stood out did so because of their raw shock value or the hilarious use of parody.
There were a few good shorts, most of which were directed by Paul Ezzy. Among the best of his skits was “The Mask of Zorro Two,” which was two minutes of trailers, buildup and critical acclaim for this movie, which ended up being only a couple seconds long, leaving Zorro to simply pick up his mask, saying “Oh, there’s my mask.”
Another of the festival’s prominent directors, Adam Kuykendall, showed a skit broken into two parts which involved someone “cutting down” and decorating a man like a Christmas tree, and later discarding the poor confused man in a heap of abandoned trees.
One of the better long films, entitled “Gatismo” and directed by Sarah Kennedy, played out as a silent film reminiscent of old- school 1920s cinema. It was said that the film’s idea came from a dream, and its creation was merely for a Spanish project. The end product was a somehow simultaneously disturbing and funny movie in which a troubled man misinterprets the way in which to play “cat” in charades by mauling a nearby man like a leopard mauling a gazelle.
Not all of the films were comical, however. One of the better long films was a poignant tribute to composer Astor Piazzolla directed by George Kebche. This seven-minute elegy for the tango composer featured moments of Piazzolla’s life, both cinematic and still frame, over the backdrop of his music, which added much depth and feeling to the film.
The encore presentation of one of last semester’s favorites was another of Paul Ezzy’s films, “Batman: Again.” This forty-five minute parody of a Batman movie not only brilliantly captured the cheesiness that is the Batman franchise, but also pulled off a great “Matrix” parody, all in the context of campus life at UMaine.
