On May 9, students from the Tri-Co gathered at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute for an evening of film, multimedia projects, and celebrating their peers’ artistic accomplishments.
Sponsored by Haverford’s John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, the Swarthmore College Film and Media Studies department, and the Bryn Mawr College Film Studies program, the 8th Annual Tri-Co Film Festival featured 18 short films and five multimedia presentations and was held at nearby Bryn Mawr Film Institute.
This year’s festival was run by co-directors Dajana Denes Walters and Sophia Abraham-Raveson ’18, and its five prizes were awarded by a duo of all-star jurors.
“The jurors this year are curator, filmmaker, and founder of BlackStar Film Festival Maori Karmael Holmes, and Naima Ramos-Chapman, a filmmaker and writer/director on the HBO show Random Acts of Flyness,” said Abraham-Raveson. “Prizes for award-winning films include memberships to local film organization, tickets and passes to see films, film journals, and some fun film-related merch.”
Each year, the Tri-Co film festival showcases a wide array of genres, and, this year, received over 50 submissions. Haverford students featured in the festival lineup included Edward Ogborn ’19 and Julia Coletti ’21 (PLASTATIC), Jesse Israel ’22 (Lighthouse at the End of the World), Jixin Jia ’21 (Lingua Franca), and Daniel Provencal-Fogarty ’20 and Katya Konradova ’19 (Left Out). The festival also showed the first episode of Dizhsa Nabani, the web series about Zapotec language and culture made last summer by the inaugural cohort of Doculab fellows alongside Assistant Professor of Linguistics Brook Danielle Lillehaugen and her collaborator Moisés García Guzmán.
Beginning at last year’s fest, Tri-Co students were invited to submit multimedia projects for display alongside films. Four out of the six projects on display were created by Haverford students: Hayden Kesterson ’19, Luba Mendelevich ’19, Jixin Jia ’21, and Edward Ogborn ’19. Mendelevich was awarded the multimedia prize for her piece, Swan Lake.
The four film prizes were awarded to three Swarthmore students, Shiko Njorge for Black Skin, Ariana Hoshina, and Natasha Markov-Riss for Barbara, which also earned the Audience Award.
Photos by Cole Sansom ’19.