Trinity Film Festival Celebrates Undergraduate Filmmakers at Seventh Annual Event

Hartford, Connecticut, May 15, 2018—Trinity Film Festival (TFF) welcomed filmmakers from across the country and from Canada, Mexico, and France to the Trinity College campus on May 5. In its seventh year of highlighting short films made by undergraduate students, Trinity Film Festival screened 22 entries at Cinestudio, followed by a banquet and awards ceremony in Mather Hall.

Sponsor XFINITY awarded the winning film with a first prize of $1,500. Selected filmmakers will be given the opportunity to have their films made available through XFINITY On Demand in the northeastern United States for a limited time. Prizes totaling more than $4,000 were presented to the top filmmakers as judged by TFF’s on-site panel of industry professionals, which this year included film critic Gerald Peary, filmmaker Michael Maren, and Cinestudio co-founder Peter McMorris. The award-winners are:

First Prize: Quynh Tran and Miguel Espinoza, Village Boi, San Diego Community College

Second Prize: Marijose Sapina and Guido Raimondo, Nymphette, EICAR (France)

Third Prize: Louis Lachance and Justine Prince, My Mom Was a Junkie Too, Cégep de Sainte-Foy (Canada)

Alumni Choice: Ingie Enan, Kingsley, New York University

Audience Choice: Jensen Vinca, L.A. Liquor, Loyola Marymount University

Screeners’ Choice: Carolina Gudiño, Mariposa, Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara (Mexico)

Best Sound: Nicole Cespedes, Micah Breitweiser and Jessica Castillo, LizardQuest, Ringling College of Art and Design

Best Editing: Carson Bloomquist, The Meteor, Connecticut College

Best Actor: Victoria Duquesne, Nymphette, EICAR (France)

Best Cinematographer: Auberin Strickland and Pedro Bitar, Night Out, Middlebury College

Best Writer: Trevor Hembling, GTA VI Voice Acting Documentary (For Innocent Bystanders), American University

Best Director(s): Louis Lachance and Justine Prince, My Mom Was a Junkie Too, Cégep de Sainte-Foy (Canada)

“The atmosphere at Trinity Film Festival is so inspiring because you can see the hard work of these young filmmakers realized on the big screen while feeling their excitement sitting in the theater next to you,” said festival founder and director John Michael Mason, a member of the Trinity College Class of 2012. “This may have been the best collection of short films we have ever had. It was a truly impressive line-up, and it was an honor to meet all these talented student filmmakers from around the world.”

TFF is a national platform for undergraduate filmmakers that provides a celebratory evening in which students premiere their short films on the big screen, engage with other student filmmakers, meet industry professionals, and win cash prizes. All films are shown at Cinestudio, the independent theater designed as a recreation of a 1930s movie palace, complete with a balcony, gold curtain, and wall-to-wall screen.

See photos from the festival here.

For more information about Trinity Film Festival, visit www.trinityfilmfestival.org and follow @trinityfilmfestival on Facebook and Instagram.