Hartford, Conn. (updated May 3, 2012) – The Trinity Film Festival will be held on May 5, 2012 at Cinestudio on the campus of Trinity College. Watch the video trailer. Twenty-three films from a competitive pool have been selected and will be judged by an eclectic panel of professional filmmakers, academics. There will be three substantial cash prizes and a high quality mystery prize awarded by the audience, which will be unveiled at a post-screening red carpet awards ceremony. For more, visit: www.trinityfilmfestival.org.
“We are very excited about the festival,” John Michael Mason ’12, student organizer of the event, said. “Bringing together students from many different colleges for an intercollegiate film competition is a unique opportunity to interact with each other and to present works of art to an attentive audience.”
Organizers of the event said the unique 1930’s style cinema is an ideal venue for student filmmakers to showcase their work.
“This promises to be very exciting, something that shines a spotlight on our unique assets here at Trinity - like Cinestudio, while offering our own film production students and others around the country a glamorous red-carpet event that will focus all the work they do in their classes this term,” Prakash Younger, co-director of the Film Studies program at Trinity, added. “We expect it to be the start of something that will, over time, become an integral, much anticipated, part of what Film Studies at Trinity stands for.”
There have been student film festivals at Cinestudio in the past, but according to James Hanley, co-founder of Cinestudio, none that will have the same level of competition as this one, given the considerable prizes, and the new state-of-the-art digital equipment at the theater, which gives the theater more flexibility in screening student works in a high quality, high definition format.
“One of the most exciting aspects of High Definition Digital Cinema is the ability to process and display all kinds of source material and present it in a professional manner on the full size theater screen,” Hanley said. “Serious cinema presentation can at last become accessible to virtually all filmmakers.”
Cinestudio is regarded as one of the premier independent movie theaters in the country, complete with a Austrian gold screen curtain and balcony seating. The venue, which shows well over a hundred movies each year, from independent foreign films to Hollywood blockbusters, is host to other significant annual film festivals as well, including the Connecticut Gay and Lesbian Film Festival held each May-June, and the April in Paris (French language) Film Festival.
“Cinestudio is the ideal theater for screening any film, and for this festival, it gives a young filmmaker the experience of presenting his or her work in one of the premier venues in the country,” Mason added.
For more visit www.trinityfilmfestival.org, or visit the Festival's Facebook page at www.facebook.com/TrinityFilmFestival, which will be updated regularly. Follow the Trinity Film Festival on Twitter @trinityfilmfest.