Main Lines Spotlight on Student Filmmakers

On an early May evening, Aby Isakov ’24 has grabbed a seat in the back of one of four theaters at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute. For 90 minutes on this night, 18 short films will be screened and judged, and three of those are Isakov’s. The theater is nearly filled for the annual Tri-Co Film Festival, and the back row gives the young filmmaker a perfect view of the audience’s reaction to her work.

“I’d been looking forward to this since last year,” says Isakov, who had one entry at last year’s Tri-Co fest. “Hearing people’s reactions, whether it’s a sigh, a whisper, silence, or laughter is a really satisfying feeling.”

Now in its 12th year, the Tri-Co Film Festival showcases outstanding film and media works created by Haverford, Swarthmore, and Bryn Mawr students. The festival was initially organized by Eric Cho, then a visiting assistant professor of film production at Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore colleges, to formalize and encourage collaboration between student filmmakers and to showcase student projects.

At the time, Cho said, “I hope that the festival will encourage students to improve their craft, to take pride in the excellent work they’ve already done, and to begin to think of themselves as filmmakers who have something to contribute to broader audiences.”

The festival has done that and more, says Assistant Professor of Visual Studies John Muse, who is also the director of the College’s Visual Culture, Arts, and Media (VCAM) facility. “It was originally designed to support the curriculum but it’s gone far beyond that,” he says. “So many students are interested in making media, it’s not limited to those enrolled in media production courses.”

Along with Isakov (A Photograph, Lying Still, and Art Without Boundaries), Haverford students featured in this year’s festival included Logan de Raspide Ross ’23 (Love Has Wings and The Present Moment), Hunter Logan ’23 (Death Sentences, Lying Still, Chalked Up, and Atomic Time), Reesha Gandhi ’24 (Art Without Boundaries) and Maggie Weisblum ’24 (Four).

Lying Still, which shows a mortician’s struggle with the impossibility of understanding the woman they are supposed to prepare for her funeral, was awarded the Character Study and Audience Choice prizes. Jake Rothman SC ’23 won the Collaborative Filmmaking prize for Sad Green Milk, and Sadie Chernila, BMC ’25 won the Collage Work prize for I Will Not Let it Be a Baby.

As well as the chance to go public as artists, one of the many benefits of participating in the festival, says Muse, is the process of submitting the work. “Once that’s done, they have everything needed to submit to other festivals around the world. And the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities will help students fund those submissions.”

Each year, alumni who had previously participated as student filmmakers serve as the festival’s directors, and this year’s Tri-Co was organized by Marcelo Jauregui-Volpe ’18 and Ruby Bantariza SC ’20. The directors made the first cut from the films entered (this year, 30), and sent the rest to the jury—Pakistani-American filmmaker and artist Khaula Malik, and Afro-Latinx producer and filmmaker Sydney Alicia Rodriguez—which awarded the prizes.

“Each year, the festival continues to be a fitting ‘grand finale’ to the Hurford Center’s public programming,” says James Weissinger ’06, the associate director of the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and the College’s VCAM facility, who credits the success of the festival to the hard work of the directors and jurors in curating the films, as well as the more than a decade-long support of the event’s host and partner, Bryn Mawr Film Institute.

The festival, says Isakov, is one of the things she looks forward to all year. “It’s one of those times where your work is given a platform and you’re surrounded by people who are passionate about filmmaking like you are. We’re all students in this learning process, and it’s so exciting to see other people’s work and your own work and people’s reception of it. It feels like a very monumental day.”

To watch all of this year’s juried films at BMFI’s website, go to: hav.to/fuo.

—Anne Stein

FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS: For the seventh time in the past eight years, Haverford College was named one of the nation’s top producers of participants in the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, the U.S. government’s flagship international exchange program. Four recent graduates earned 2022–23 awards, a high number for a school the size of Haverford. In addition, three young alums were the winners of a Fulbright Scholarship, a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship, and a Fulbright Study/Research Award. And Fords won an impressive number of other national awards this year, with the tally so far at eight National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows, three Goldwater Fellows, one Watson Fellow, a Newman Civic Fellow, a Truman Scholar, a Coro Fellow, and one Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress Presidential Fellow.