Lewis Center for the Arts

Lewis Center for the Arts presents End of Semester Film Screenings

Reported Wednesday, May 1, 2024

Pictured Above: Still from a film by Princeton student Kate Stewart as part of her junior independent work in the Program in Visual Arts. Photo courtesy Kate Stewart ’25. Photo Credit: Contributed.

Featuring the independent work of juniors and seniors in the visual arts program, along with work by students in spring film and animation courses

Newsroom Post: PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Princeton, NJ – The Program in Visual Arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts and the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University will present new work by students at two separate film screenings. On May 8 at 7:30 p.m., the Junior and Senior Film Festival screening will feature ten short films in animation, documentary, and narrative genres made by students who are focusing on film as their independent work. On May 9 at 4:30 and 7:30 p.m., the Student Film Screening will feature 23 short films created by students in spring 2024 semester courses. Refreshments will be served each evening. Both events will be held in the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau Street and are free and open to the public. The Film Theater is an accessible venue. Guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date. Learn more about the film program at (here).

The ten juniors and seniors presenting their films on May 8 are either pursuing certificates or minors in the Program in Visual Arts with a focus on film while majoring in another area of study at the University, or they are completing degrees in the Practice of Art track offered through the Department of Art and Archaeology. This year’s seniors, the Class of 2024, are the final class earning certificates in visual art; the program now offers a minor in visual arts starting with the Class of 2025. The screening includes work by seniors Daniel Drake, David Akpokiere, Justin Zhang, Kirsten Pardo, and Sreesha Ghosh. Juniors showing films include Isadora Alsadir Knutsen, Kate Stewart, Nathalie Barnes, Paige Morton, and Stella Amyot.

The screening on May 9 includes short, new works created by students in the courses “Digital Animation” taught by Tim Szetela, “Narrative Filmmaking I” taught by Moon Molson, and “Documentary Filmmaking II” taught by Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt. Szetela’s popular animation course engages students in a variety of timed-based collage, composition, visualization, and storytelling techniques in order to learn the fundamentals of 2D animation production. Molson’s course introduces students to narrative film production and teaches the basic tools and techniques for storytelling with digital media, including camera operation, nonlinear editing, sound design, visual composition, and more. In Perlmutt’s documentary filmmaking class, students first analyze classic and contemporary strategies for making documentaries and then work on creating their own short film.

The undergraduate students presenting their films on May 9 include Adam Sanders, Austria Merritt, Callum Boyagoda, Daniel Yeo, Evelyn Walsh, Gabriel Centeno, Jae Sim, Kareem Jaber, Karina Macosko, Kate Stewart, Lana Glisic, Madeline McDonald, Mahalia Norton, Mariana Castillo, Michelle Tang, Minh Truong, Nivan Dhamija, Paige Morton, Simone Kirkevold, Sreesha Ghosh, Tyler Benson, Zach Lee, and Zev Schuman.

Molson’s short films have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, screened at over 250 international film festivals, and have received more than 100 awards worldwide, including the Grand Jury Prizes at Palm Springs, South by Southwest (SXSW), and the Student Academy Awards. His screenplay Johnny Ace was a finalist for Best Screenplay at the 2018 Urbanworld Film Festival, and his most recent screenplay, Hyper/Space, was selected as a finalist in the AT&T Untold Stories competition at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival and won top honors at the 2022 Urbanworld Film Festival. He has attended the 2008 Sundance Screenwriters & Directors Labs, the 2008 Film Independent (FIND) Directors Labs, the 2015 Warner Brothers Television Directors’ Workshop, and 2016 FOX Global Directors Initiative as a Fox Director Fellow. Molson was named a 2017 Pew Foundation Fellow, a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow in Film-Video, and was one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in summer 2007. He has received grants from the San Francisco Film Society, The Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Sundance Institute.

Perlmutt most recently directed the Emmy-nominated historical documentary Massacre at the Stadium (Netflix, 2019). He directed, produced, and edited Havana Motor Club (Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2016), which premiered at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival and screened as part of the exhibition Motion. Autos, Art, Architecture at the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao. His other documentary film work includes Diana Vreeland: The Eye has to Travel, Lumo, Control Room, Valentino: The Last Emperor, Les Vulnerables, Invisible Killers: Ebola, Man V. Volcano, and other projects. Perlmutt’s commercial work has included directing and editing over 30 spots for Estée Lauder, Gucci, Bulgari, Rag & Bone, Samsung, H&M, Vogue, and others. He has served as a correspondent for UNICEF and has made films for non-governmental organizations including The Chopra Center, HelpAge International, UNIFEM, the New York Academy of Medicine, Every Mother Counts, and HEAL Africa. Perlmutt is a member of the Director’s Guild of America, the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Indie Film,” and a recipient of two Sundance Institute/Sloan Foundation grants. Prior to Princeton, he taught filmmaking at Columbia University, William Paterson University, and for organizations in Africa.

Szetela is a designer, animator and digital artist who makes moving images, games, and assorted interfaces to visualize location, language, and other patterns. Rewordable, the game he co-designed using computational linguistics, was published by Penguin Random House. His short films have screened at numerous international animation festivals, including Anima Mundi, Annecy, Ottawa International Animation Festival, and Zagreb World Festival of Animated Films. Hi work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, the Museum of Fine Arts and Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, as well as a variety of digital art, game, and technology festivals and exhibitions. Szetela has taught digital animation and data drawing courses in the Program in Visual Arts since 2017. In fall 2022 at Princeton he organized Games &&, a symposium featuring artists, designers, and researchers who explore and experiment with the tools and techniques of game design and development.

Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Program in Visual Arts, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.