Photo of the BFMI screening by John Muse.
The big winner at this year’s Tri-Co Film Festival was a class, not a person. All four of the 2015 fest’s awards went to films made in Visiting Assistant Professor of Independent College Programs John Muse’s “Film on Photography” course. Dawit Habtemariam ’15 won the award for creative non-fiction filmmaking for his Family Affairs, which used black-and-white photographs found in books to tell a story about the lynching of African Americans in the United States. Bryn Mawr students enrolled in Muse’s class took home the other prizes: Jing Ma (BMC ’17) was recognized for “poetic storytelling” for Creation, and Maya Yu Zhang 張宇 (BMC ’15) and Zhujun Bamboo Ding (BMC ’16) won both the first-person filmmaking award and the audience award for My Sister Swallowed the Zoo.
The festival, which was founded by Swarthmore Professor Erica Cho in 2012, celebrates short films (no longer than 10-minutes long) of all genres made by students at Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Swarthmore during the past academic year. Hilary Brashear ’14, who took home the prize for documentary writing in 2013 for her film Triptyc, directed this year’s festival with Dani Ford (BMC ’13). Films were juried by Associate Director of Arts at International House Philadelphia Robert Cargini-Mitchell and Irina Leimbacher, a film scholar at Keene State College, and shown at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute (BFMI) on May 7.
Learn more about Haverford’s plans for curriculum development in visual studies.