Story by Stephen Zegalia
Photos by Branden Andersen
This weekend the OpenLens Winter Short Film Festival featured a number of screenings, workshops, and competitions. Held at the University of Oregon Baker Center at 10th and High Street, the Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts (DIVA) sponsored the festival. For the short film competition, first prize and honorable mention received prizes of $500 and $200, respectively. A vote by OpenLens attendees determined the $100 Audience Choice award.
This year’s host was Dan Schaefer, a storyboard artist, filmmaker, and conceptual designer whose work in film ranges from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon show to Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park. The festival opened Friday night with a showing of Schaefer’s documentary film Mania, an exploration of the history of the Portland Trail Blazers as seen through the eyes of some of the most important people involved with the team, including Brandon Roy and Harry Glickman.
Saturday began with a storyboarding workshop run by Schaefer, in which he shared some of the artistic and conceptual lessons he has learned during his career. A showing of Schaefer’s latest film, Figaro, followed the workshop. Also a documentary, Figaro is about the collaboration between University of Louisville students and Polish students on a production of the opera, The Marriage of Figaro. It follows the production through rehearsals to the finished show, which was staged in both Kentucky and Poland. After the film, Schaefer and Philip Piele of the Eugene Opera hosted a Q&A session where they explained the making of the film and the differences between college and professional productions.
This was the first year that the short film competition drew entries from across the state, instead of just the Eugene area.
“We got forty submissions but could only accept twelve,” says Eric Ostlind, the DIVA program coordinator. “I sent out the standard rejection letter saying we had too many good submissions, but this year it was actually true.”
The event drew over hundred people to the screening Saturday night, where the short films ranged from music videos to high school basketball-themed projects. The winner of the $500 first prize was The Tell, a short about the story of two demons playing poker in order to win a human soul. Honorable Mention went to Mutate, a stop-motion animation about the evolution of several clay characters. The French-language Sous La Pluie received the Audience Choice award.
Sunday brought the Youth Visions’ Teen Video Competition, in which fifteen shorts made by Oregon residents aged thirteen to eighteen were screened and judged. The competition included shorts about archery accidents, dating, and an undead Beethoven.
Part of the reason for the festival’s success, Ostlind says, was that this was the first year it was held at the Baker Center instead of DIVA’s old space. Longtime DIVA supporter Leslie Oldenburg was happy about the change: “If you’ve ever seen a film at the old place, it was about half this size, and dark. It was terrible. This year is much better.”
