“When you love film, you live film”. The words appeared all over downtown Dallas starting in late March. That’s right. The Dallas Film Festival is here in town and CHS has some territory in the festival itself.
If you are not familiar with the Dallas Film Festival, or any film festival for that matter, don’t worry. A film festival is where independent films from all over the world are brought in for about a week or so and people can buy tickets to see them.
There are thousands of festivals that happen around the world. Some famous ones are the Toronto festival, Sundance festival in Colorado, and the Atlanta film festival.
With every film festival that comes around, there is usually always a high school competition that takes place as well. And this year, sophomore Ryan Whittle from New Tech High School got his film chosen to be in the competition.
“I was excited but more nervous and anxious than anything,” said Ryan Whittle.
Ryan’s film is a short documentary about how a high school and an international organization can raise money to radically change the lives of ex-slave children in Ghana West Africa.
The movie played on Saturday at 11:30 a.m. with all the other high school films. People seemed to be impressed with the film that Ryan made.
“I thought it sent a good message across,” said fellow movie watcher Sidney Johnston. “It’s hard to cram a message like that into five minutes but he did a really good job with doing it.”
Out of all the high school movies that played, Ryan’s was the only documentary. All the others were either short drama’s, action movies, or even one called “A world without art.”
Other than the high school shorts, real produced shorts were made for the regular screenings as well. All the shorts were categorized into by what they were. For example, there was one screening at midnight on Saturday called the “midnight shorts”. It was group of “weird” shorts that were grouped together.
On Wednesday April 7th, there was a “pre-festival” party that took place at the Palomar hotel over by West Village. There seemed to be waves of people filing in and out just to get some face time with local directors and actors.
“Other than watching my movie, I really enjoyed being at the festival on the first weekend,” said Ryan Whittle. “It really excited me to see some new and interesting movies.”
I got the opportunity to meet some really cool people such as Tom Huckabee who made the film “Carried Away”. Tom was a really cool man who sat down and talked to me one on one about filmmaking and directing.
While the party was fun, I was looking forward to the actual festival.
The movies for the festival were screened at two movie locations. One was the historical Magnolia theatre that was in the heart of a shopping area. Secondly was the Angelika theatre, which was located over in the corner of another giant shopping center.
The weekend played itself out in an interesting manor at some points, but all the while I only got about five hours of sleep each night. I was practically dead by Monday morning.
The festival continues all the way through April 18th with the award ceremonies capping off the festival.
