Alumni’s films coming to a TV near you

It’s not often that budding filmmakers can screen their student films for an international audience ““ especially when the subject matter is deeply personal. However, three UCLA students are getting that opportunity with KCET’s 12th Annual Fine Cut Film Series.

Hezekiah Lewis’ film “Warrior Queen,” Avital Shalev’s “Movie Night” and Alexandra Fisher’s “Desert Wedding” were three of the 16 total films selected.

The series, which will showcase student films submitted to KCET by
their schools or professors, will be airing every Thursday on KCET at
10 p.m. and online throughout the month of April.

The submitted films showcase a variety of genres and styles, and
come from Southern California film schools such as California Institute
of the Arts, Loyola Marymount, the American Film Institute and USC.

KCET,
a Los Angeles-based public broadcasting station, has produced “Fine
Cut” from a donation by the Bridges Larson foundation, established by
producer Jack Larson.

Within the last two years, film projects included in the series have
been produced, including the genres of animation, drama and even
foreign language films.

For alumni Lewis and Fisher, both 2008
master’s graduates, their initial exposure resulted from the UCLA
School of Theatre, Film and Television’s annual Spotlight Awards, an
awards ceremony that highlights the best works of current students.

Lewis’ and Fisher’s films were featured during the Spotlight Awards’ opening night, and a DVD of the films was passed on to the “Fine Cut” producers at KCET.

Lewis said that having his film on KCET was a blessing that allowed him to share a different point of view of African-Americans to the public.

“I really want people to really see the story and hopefully then touch people and really make people talk about and think about the whole unit of culture and identity and how important that is,” he said.

Lewis, who wrote and directed “Warrior Queen,” is now a film professor at Villanova University.

“Warrior Queen” is a 20-minute film about the story of Nana Yaa Asantewaa, an African queen who led the Ashanti people to war against the British in the 1900s. It will be the first UCLA student film to air on KCET tonight.

The film was shot in four and a half days on location in Ghana with the help of various sponsors and corporate grants, including the James Bridges grant given by KCET.

“I always tell people I learned more about life than I did about filmmaking,” Lewis said. “Me going back to Africa and being an African-American and now understanding where those roots come from was big.”

Lewis said that socially conscious films are hard to market, but he is optimistic about the exposure of his film through KCET.

“A lot of people are really responding to it, and a lot of great opportunities are coming out of it,” he said. “It is these socially conscious films that people are starting to see can be done. We can find ways to make it happen, to feed this passion for this art and this art form.”

In the same theme of social awareness, alumna Alexandra Fisher created her film as a subtle response to the war in Iraq.

Though her film, “Desert Wedding,” makes no direct reference to the war, the film’s premise centers on the stress and anxiety of preparing for a wedding intertwined with a tragedy that forces the bride to evaluate what really is important in her life.

“In my life, a lot of my friends were getting married at the moment,” Fisher said. “Witnessing that and thinking about the war, (I found that) people don’t feel they are at war while people are dying somewhere else. Those were the issues percolating in my mind that allowed the story to surface … seeing so many of my friends freak out (about) tiny things that don’t matter in the scheme of things.”

Fisher wrote, directed and coproduced the film from money she had scraped together from various private sponsorships and awards. She said that short films are not necessarily the most lucrative in a market that tends to favor star-studded blockbusters, but there is a more intrinsic satisfaction.

Fisher finished the film a week before her graduation and, like Lewis, created the film as part of her thesis project.

“Making a film is so much hard work,” Fisher said. “I didn’t want to put blood, sweat and tears into a project if it doesn’t have some sort of greater meaning ““ not only to me, but in a way I think can touch and affect other people.”

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