Fairfax County will be holding its third annual Student Film Festival at the Angelica Theater on May 26.
Initially created as a way for prospective students to learn about what the members of the IB Film Studies course do, the festival has since expanded to showcase the creativity of students from various FCPS high schools.
“For IB film kids that’s the highest achievement of their artistic expression, to show these films they spent hours working on,” IB Film Studies teacher Pierce Bello said.
Seniors Hannah De Lucia, Katrina Uher and Ellen Rank will have films shown among the many featured at the festival.
Icarus is an adventure coming of age film by Uher and Rank that tells the story of a boy named Danny who is left on the side of the road by his mother after an argument in the car.
The film then shows his survival in the woods where his mom left him. However, the filming process had to first overcome some challenges.
“It was 20 degrees, so filming outside was terrible, but our actors were brilliant and they stuck with us. The snow in itself was problematic because we hadn’t planned for it, but it worked well,” senior Uher said.
De Lucia’s film Placebo explores how a relationship falls apart.
“I was on a bit of an Ingmar Bergman binge, and his films often deal with what people expect from others, as well as how they actually treat them,” De Lucia said. “I got to thinking a lot about my current relationship and my friends’ relationships, and decided to kind of take one recurrent problem—falsely believing that one person can cure all of our problems—to its extreme.”