Redstone Film Festival Nominees Announced

From a coming-of-age about high school heartbreak to a documentary about the ups and downs of the Gloucester fishing industry, the finalists for the annual Redstone Film Festival are ready for their big screen debut.

Students will come together with friends, family, and faculty on March 31 at 7 p.m. at the Tsai Performance Center for the annual showcase and award ceremony for COM student films and screenwriting

“The Redstone Film Festival is a treasured opportunity for us to come together as a community in celebration of the work of our talented students and alums,” says Film and Television Department Chair Paul Schneider.

For more than 30 years, top undergraduate and graduate students have competed for the awards, sponsored by Canon and the Sumner M. Redstone Charitable Foundation. 

Coming from the Film and Television Department, six films made the cut for final nominations at the festival in six categories: Best Film, Actor, Cinematography, Screenplay, Editing and Sound Design.

Up for the awards are: Art Boy, Concetta, In Cod We Trust, The Rest of the House, Saved by Love, Semper F*cked.

Art Boy, written and directed by Eli Canter (COM‘23), follows a shy high schooler at a Halloween party after being rejected by his best friend.

The drama Concetta, written and directed by Geraldo Hinch (COM‘23), follows a nurse at an assisted living facility who must get her dementia patient to eat.

In one of the country’s oldest and largest fishing communities, the industry is in danger from changing regulations and ocean temperatures that fishermen in Gloucester, Mass., are struggling to keep up in Raphael Edwards (COM’23) and Seonghoon (Eric) Park’s (COM‘23) documentary, In Cod We Trust.

A green card marriage leads to questions about love and feelings toward one another in the drama The Rest of the House, written and directed by Lola Kenet (COM’23).

Saved by Love, a documentary by Valentyn Arden (COM’23) and Zack Furnari (COM’24), showcases the desire for a family through adoption and navigating societal norms against their sexuality.

A marine’s bachelor party goes a little too far off course in the comedy Semper F*cked, written by Matt Michaud (COM’23) and directed by Robey Leonardi (COM’23).

Eleven films were also nominated for the Fleder-Rosenberg Feature and Short Film screenplay contests, sponsored by COM alumni Gary Fleder and Scott Rosenberg.

For Feature Film screenplay: Casualties of Truth and Lies by Brian Thompson, Crepi Lupo by Emma Cancro, The Milky Way by Alexa Salimpour, Old World by Sophie Falkenheim and Quiet by Joshua Marx.

For Short Film screenplay: Gold Stars by Sifr Dimachkie, Kai by Zane Henley, Re-Vamped by Cheyenne Smith, Stray Cat Blues by Alyssa Winn, Think Tank by Tiara Masso and Wit of the Staircase by Zoe Weng.

Students Kellie Innes and Hoor El-Shafei will also be honored as co-winners of the Film and Television Studies Award for Innovative Scholarship for their work on “A Show Which Will Live in Infamy: Band of Brothers and Media as Historical Memory” (by Innes) and “Honor Killing and the Case of Amina and Sarah Said” (by El-Shafei).