Taft students Eliza Price '17, Felicity Petruzzi '16, and Katie Ajemian '16 won top honors at the Tribeca Film Festival's "The America I Am" Youth Film Competition. The film was built around a poem written and performed by Lauren Fadiman '17 and SeArah Smith '17. The honor includes a $10,000 prize.
"The girls were just incredibly excited," said Taft Video Teacher Scott Serafine, who accompanied the fimmakers to New York for the event. "I can't say enough about how well they were treated by the Tribeca executives and the National Parks Service. It was a day they will never forget."
A full story on the Tribeca experience will follow upon the group's full return to campus. For now, background:
The collaborative work of five Taft students will take center stage in New York City next week when FIRE, a short film based on a spoken word performance piece of the same name, debuts at the renowned Tribeca Film Festival.
The film was produced by Eliza Price ’17 and directed by Felicity Petruzzi ’16, with cinematography by Katie Ajemian ’16. It is built around an original poem crafted by Lauren Fadiman ’17 and SeArah Smith ’17 who performed the piece during Taft’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day Multicultural Arts Celebration in January. Both the film and the poem explore themes of racism and sexism in today’s society.
“FIRE is heavily based on our personal experiences,” explained Lauren. “For me, it is about coming to terms with privileges I hold as a young woman, but also coming to terms with privileges I don’t hold. The challenge was to express that in a way that would be palatable to those who have had a different experience.”
Facing that challenge now, said SeArah, was to some degree a function of timing and context.
“We did not want to be viewed as two women with strong opinions screaming out in protest. We did not want to be viewed as ‘aggressive,’” SeArah said. “But in the past year, the conversation has changed at Taft. We have had speakers on campus talking about issues surrounding race and gender. Our community has been learning more and seeing more. The prevalence of people calling out police brutality on the news and in social media allowed us to write about our own experiences in reference to what is going on in mainstream society. There is momentum—the walls are breaking down. I am more able to fully and confidently express everything that I am about.”
And it is that connection to what is happening in America today—that full expression of self in reference to society as a whole—that made FIRE, the poem, the ideal foundation for the film. Co-sponsored by the Statue of Liberty National Monument and Tribeca Film Institute in celebration of the National Park Service’s centennial, “The America I Am” competition invited young filmmakers to submit short films about their “American experience.”
Filmmakers Katie, Felicity, and Eliza have worked together on a number of projects at Taft. Katie, who will study filmmaking at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts after graduating from Taft, has done much of the production work on those projects. Felicity has focused on the writing, (and on developing a Wes Anderson-style film for an Independent Tutorial this year), while Eliza has primarily been in front of the camera as an actor.
“They had been working on submissions for a couple of different film festivals,” explained Taft Video Arts Teacher Scott Serafine. “They had this concept, but needed more powerful images. Thinking about that—about a powerful statement through powerful images—led them back to FIRE, which had such a big impact when Lauren and SeArah performed it in January.”
Using the audio of Lauren and SeArah’s spoken word performance as their soundtrack, Katie, Felicity, and Eliza shot companion footage around Taft’s campus—footage designed to show fear, isolation, and the manifestations of racist and sexist attitudes.
“FIRE contains messages that need to be heard but that high school students are not particularly comfortable talking about,” said Eliza. “Taft has created a good environment for these conversations; we provided a spark.”
In February Serafine received word that FIRE had been named one of five finalists in “The America I Am” competition; it was selected from more than 250 submissions. As finalists, the team earned a $1,000 production award and a mentorship with a professional filmmaker, both to support their efforts in producing a final cut of the short film, which premieres next week at Tribeca.
“We had more running time for the final version,” explained Katie, “so we were able to add in more of the poem and to cut in clips of actual news footage from current events. We also reshot some scenes outside of the Taft campus and added first-person interviews. They were student actors portraying real life experiences.”
“We realized that what we had done originally made sense in a Taft context, but that it was important to move off campus to better portray a more universal experience," noted Felicity.
All of finalists earned all expense paid travel to the Tribeca Film Festival, with all-access passes to Tribeca events. The Taft contingent will attend a screening of Youth In Oregon on April 20, which features a screenplay by Andrew Eisen ’04. FIRE will be shown Thursday, April 21 at 10:30 am in the Tribeca Film Center Screening Room, 375 Greenwich Street, and again at 5:30 pm at the Ellis Island Theater, during the National Parks Service Centennial Celebration on Ellis Island. The grand-prize winner will be announced at the Ellis Island event, and will receive the NECO Award: a $10K production award and scholarship for post-production services and film education provided by the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations.
A link to the movie will be available here after the Tribeca Film Festival.
Since its inception in 2002, the Tribeca Film Institute has championed storytellers to be catalysts for change in their communities and around the world. For more information, visit Tribecafilm.com or theamericaiam.org