The Seventh Annual Tri-Co Film Festival was a held on May 10, 2018.
Director: Harlow Figa • Jurors: Shari Frilot and Sosena Solomon
Photos courtesy of Holden Blanco ‘17 and the Haverford Communications Office
Special thanks to Lightbox Film Center and PhillyCam for their generous awards, and to the Bryn Mawr Film Institute for providing award winners with tickets and hosting us once again!
New Media Prize
TwitterVision by Nicky Rhodes HC’19
Verite Documentary Filmmaking
Living Legends by Akosua Ampofo BMC’19
Excellence in Experimental Filmmaking
Halve the Peach, Split the Seed by Sasha Klugar BMC ’19
Special Jury Prize for Original Storytelling
Swim, Swim, Swim, Swim by Cecilia Burke HC’18
Dramatic Filmmaking Prize
M.A.Y by Julian Turner SC’18
2018 Audience Favorite
JOY by Ruby Bantariza SC’20
Spotlighted New Media
Scroll through the photo reel above to see pics of these installations in action!
- TwitterVision – Nicky Rhodes HC’19
TwitterVision is a tool that uses the Microsoft Hololens’ mixed reality capabilities to overlay real-time Twitter data into the real world, creating an immersive environment in which the user interacts with data on a physical, somatic plane. - Blockroom – Hannah Beilinson HC’20, Grace Newman- Lapinski BMC’19, Abigail Haakyung Lee BMC’19
Explore the virtual reality world of Blockroom, an interactive art exhibition! Using our iOS app and the Google Cardboard, navigate a randomly generated landscape of boxes to seek out public artworks we take for granted in the Philly area. - Novaya Derevnya Remembered – Luba Mendelevich HC’19
In this installation I am exploring how memories of places change overtime and the way disintegration of human-built struc- tures changes how we remember them. Seeing things naturally deteriorate evokes different feelings then seeing these same things demolished. - Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge – Natalie Jortner HC’18
This project is meant to be shown on a loop, as a representation of the activity going on around the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge itself is a sculpture project which was then turned into a prop for stop-motion animation. - Somatic – Cole Sansom HC’19 & Katie Hulihan HC’19
A multimedia installation utilizing multi-channel video and several interactive pieces, focusing around bodily sensations and a mannequin. Gallery viewers are encouraged not only to look around and focus on the video of the mannequin displayed on three screens, but also to interact with the mannequin themselves.
Director’s Sidebar
The Director’s Sidebar highlights submitted films that were not selected for this year’s program, but demonstrate exceptional creativity, craft, and intentionality.
Please note that some films are not publicly available.
Atelo – Saket Sekhsaria
Catherine stumbles upon “Atelo”, a fully immersive VR game into which she “plugs” herself.
View Film
Swisher – Tiye Pulley
Swisher is a day in the life of J, a young black man in a neighborhood where someone just like him has been shot by a police officer.
*2017 Festival-goers may remember a similar film (same title) — Tiye has re-cut his work, demonstrating notable growth and change, and Swisher was welcomed to the 2018 Sidebar. **Swisher is currently not publically streamable due to the festival submission process.
Slow Train K751 – Hangcheng Xu
A 25-year-old white-collar worker does not have enough money for food on the train home. He dreams of a girl who offers him a lunch box, but gets disappointed when he wakes up. However, the girl who appears in his dream later does bring him a lunch box in reality.
A Girl Dreams of Gold – Edward Ogborn, Andrew McGettigan, Julia Holeman
A Haverford student recounts a recurring dream in which a field trip goes awry. Her story is accompanied by visual interpretations of the events that take place using practical effects, open source media, and stop motion imagery.
Jurors
Festival Juror/Programmer, Shari Frilot
Sundance Senior Programmer, Chief Curator of New Frontier
Shari’s focus is American and World Cinema dramatic features, as well as films that experiment and push the boundaries of conventional storytelling. She is also the founder and driving creative force behind New Frontier at Sundance. As Co-Director of Programming for OUTFEST (1998-2001), she founded the Platinum section, which introduced cinematic installation and performance to the festival. As Festival Director of MIX: The New York Experimental Lesbian & Gay Film Festival (1993-1996) she co-founded the first gay Latin American film festivals, MIX BRASIL and MIX MÉXICO. Shari is a filmmaker and recipient of multiple grants, including the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Media Arts Foundation. She is a graduate of Harvard/Radcliffe & the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She joined the programming team in 1998.
Festival Juror/Programmer, Sosena Solomon
Sosena Solomon is an award-winning social documentary film and multimedia visual artist from Ethiopia.
Intuitively selecting subjects and stories, she is particularly interested in spaces of transition and change, acting as a cultural preservationist. Her work, whether presented as a film or an immersive 3-dimensional experience, explores cross sections of various subcultures and communities in flux, carefully teasing out cultural nuances and capturing personal narratives via arresting visual storytelling and cinéma vérité stylings.
Sosena has worked for many years in the commercial and nonprofit sectors and has worked as a Director and Cinematographer on many short film projects including “Sole”, a documentary on sneaker culture that premiered on PBS affiliate MINDTV, and “MERKATO”, filmed on location in one of Africa’s largest open-air markets and exhibited internationally as an audio, visual, and sensory installation.
Sosena earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Social Documentary Film from The School of Visual Arts in New York, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Television Production from Temple University. She is a recipient of The Leeway Foundation Art and Change grant (2013) and the Transformation Award (2014).
Sosena is a freelancer currently lecturing in the Fine Arts Department at University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design and in the Film and Video Department at the University of the Arts. She has previously lectured at Temple University’s School of Media and Communication (SMC).
Director
Festival Director, Harlow Figa
Harlow Figa is a documentary media artist from Chicago who applies their identities as a transgender, queer, and disabled person to explore (dis)ability, the medicalized and gendered body, accessibility, and modes of creatively expressing personal narratives. They graduated with High Honors in Anthropology from Haverford College in 2016 and has since worked as a director, cinematographer, editor, and graphic designer on a variety of documentary film and media projects. Harlow’s personal documentaries have shown at the 2016 St. Louis International Film Festival, 2016 Pink Life QueerFest in Ankara, Turkey, and 2015/16 Tri-Co Film Festivals in Bryn Mawr, PA.