By Iris Hiskey Arno
Arts and Entertainment
(Original Publication: March 2, 2008)
RESPONDING to the film classes and clubs proliferating in high schools around
the county, the Westchester International Film Festival has added a Future
Filmmakers Division this year. The student submissions in grades 9 through
12 will be screened at the City Center 15: Cinema de Lux in White Plains on
March 9 and, through the support of the Matthew S. Hisiger Film Foundation,
the student capturing first prize will win $1,000 and the student’s school
will receive a professional high-definition camera package valued at $5,000.
Iris Stevens is the director of both the Westchester County Office of Film
and Television and the film festival. When she and members of her staff called
every high school in the county to promote their new competition, they discovered
what she called a “staggering statistic.”
“Of the 63 public and private high schools in Westchester,” she
said, “only 12 do not have some form of film education!”
At Hastings High School, the English department chairman, Michael Mahony, has
been teaching two film courses — analyzing Hollywood films and creating
nonfiction films — since 1994. Recent annual enrollment has been as high
as 90 students. The school has had a Film Society for more than 10 years and
a film festival for three. As part of a new senior alternative last spring,
15 students worked on a documentary under Dr. Mahony’s direction and
several current seniors have already approached him to sponsor their individual
filmmaking efforts.
“Film is one medium that students seem to intrinsically value, maybe
more than any other, and students from both ends of the academic spectrum thrive
in the classes,” Dr. Mahony said. “Recently, I’ve had many
more who are seriously considering the film industry.” A number of his
former students have gone on to film school, and Benh Zeitlin, a 2000 Hastings
High School graduate, won the award for Best Animated Short at the 2005 Slamdance
Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
Byram Hills High School offered only one film media class when David McMichael
began teaching in its art department 10 years ago. Now, he and another teacher
work with about 150 students each year in Film I, Film II and Advanced Film
Workshop. The school has two film clubs — one for watching and one for
making movies — and a yearly screening of the best student films.
“Kids are watching a ton more films these days in so many different ways — on
iPods, computers, pay-per-view, DVDs — and it has become technically
much easier to make a film because extremely sophisticated tools are less expensive
and easier to acquire,” Mr. McMichael said. “And since students
are able to make movies in school and be involved in so many aspects of filmmaking — operating
the camera, directing, acting and editing — they can get a better idea
of the whole picture.”
Six years ago, Eastchester High School’s director of technology, Anita
Better, recognized the need for a full-time person to take charge of the school’s
TV studio and Michael Goldstein was hired as a teaching media specialist. After
converting the simple studio to a media production center, he began teaching
two levels of film courses in which, he said, he covers “all factors
from pre- to postproduction, including concept ideas, screenplay writing and
formatting, storyboard design, filming, lighting, sound and computer-based
editing.” Mr. Goldstein anticipates that the Eastchester Film Festival,
complete with its own version of the Academy Awards, will screen close to three
hours of student films this spring.
“I don’t think this increased interest in film is a blip or an
aberration,” Ms. Stevens said. “It’s something that’s
very real within the teen and young adult community. Education is changing
in response to the kinds of careers young people want to go into and filmmaking
is becoming a major player.”