Local High School Graduate’s Work Highlighted in Cannes Film Festival

BY C. JAYDEN SMITH

Recent high school graduate Charlotte Quintanar, a San Clemente resident, found herself on the French Riviera in late May as part of one of the most renowned film events in the world.

The former St. Margaret’s Episcopal School student had been invited to screen her short film, Bee the Solution, in the Cannes Film Festival’s Emerging Filmmaker High School Films Showcase, one of numerous categories meant to spotlight breakout artists.

Although Quintanar’s piece didn’t win “Best High School Film,” she described the experience as inspiring. She attended various workshops and panels, spoke to film experts and professionals, and met other high school and college filmmakers.

“It was just an eye-opening experience,” said Quintanar. “I loved every minute of it.”

An avid fan of movies and science, she received her introduction to film as an eighth-grade student of teacher Karen Bennett at St. Margaret’s in San Juan Capistrano. Bennett sparked what was previously a mild interest into a passion for filmmaking, especially documentaries.

Quintanar told San Clemente Times she had no idea at the time the extent of film’s impact on her life going forward, as she plans to attend the University of Chicago to study documentary filmmaking and molecular engineering.

She took Bennett’s introduction and honors courses over the years in addition to working with Bennett outside of class.

The classes’ hands-on style and encouragement of students to be creative allowed her to try new things and stumble at times.

“I’ve learned so much through mistakes, and things I’ve missed, and messing up a ton of times,” said Quintanar. “I’ve definitely learned and improved over these few years, but I definitely still have more to learn.”

Bennett was much more effusive in her description of her former student. A 20year film teacher who completed her fifth year at St. Margaret’s at the end of the 2022-2023 academic year, she’s learned that it is difficult for students to receive invitations to events as prestigious as Cannes, so she doesn’t push her students to enter such competitions with intensity, if at all.

Likening Quintanar to Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series, Bennett described Quintanar as tenacious, intellectual, curious, and as someone with whom others enjoy working together.

Over time, Quintanar evolved from appearing on camera to explain concepts in her pieces to making her work more professional and cinematic, with Bennett’s help.

“That was a lot of fun to me, to talk to her about interview techniques and how to put other people on camera, telling the story without your own voice or your own image on camera,” said Bennett.

“There’s a big step forward with this documentary, as far as her interview techniques and, for sure, with her B-roll,” Bennett continued. “She rented lenses that would help to film within a beehive and things like that.”

In the summer before her senior year, while Quintanar and her peers wrestled with deciding what postsecondary schools to apply to, she chose to make her short film about the declining population of bees worldwide.

Having always been infatuated with bees, she first reached out to The Ecology Center in San Juan, where she interviewed Community Programs Manager Amanda Mahaffey.

While on a trip to London with her family, Quintanar was able to connect with scientific experts Paula Carnell and Nick Tew. Carnell works as a beekeeper at the gardens of The Newt in Somerset, and Tew was a research assistant with the Royal Horticultural Society at the time of filming.

Quintanar had learned about Carnell while watching an online talk Carnell gave. She was “incredibly nervous” to meet both experts and bring her filming equipment across the Atlantic as part of her first in-person interview with them, but she called the process an amazing experience.

“I didn’t want to mess it up; I wanted to come across as professional as I could, and so I was definitely nervous going into it,” she said. “But both Paula and Nick, who I interviewed while I was in the UK, were fantastic.”

Bennett added that her favorite part of Quintanar’s work on the project was when she reached out to a photojournalist who had completed work in China. The photojournalist captured images of people tasked with using ladders to go up and pollinate flowers after the Szechuan Province region had lost all its bees.

Quintanar was able to befriend the photojournalist and use some of the photos in her own documentary, something she found difficult to do, as she recognizes the vast differences in education, experience and equipment between her and that of professional filmmakers, photographers and scientists.

“(I don’t feel) like an underdog, but I think it’s been difficult to be a high school documentary filmmaker when it’s just such an established field,” she said. “I feel like there’s a lot of opportunities for narrative high school filmmakers, but the documentary world is a little bit more difficult to tap into.”

Quintanar’s editing was “top-notch,” Bennett said, in that she did well to let the main characters of the film tell the film’s story.

“I think it’s just a really well-told story, and I think her editing helps make that clear,” said Bennett. “I think that’s a huge leap forward for her and stands out amongst high school documentary films.”

After she finished putting together the roughly nine-minute video, Quintanar searched online for different festivals to which she could submit her film. She came across the Cannes Film Festival and thought, “Why not?”

One day, she received a phone call from an unknown number, the type of call she normally doesn’t pick up. For whatever reason, she answered the call, and the person on the other end was a festival representative who informed Quintanar that she’d made it into the showcase.

“I was shocked to begin with, and then I was very, very excited,” she said.

Bennett also spoke about the lively moment.

“Charlotte texted me, freaking out, and I texted her right back, freaking out as much as she was,” Bennett recalled.

Soon after, the two got to work in preparing for the festival and knowing what to do and say, so Quintanar could present herself well.

Quintanar said she wanted to continue down the path of documentary filmmaking, with the goal of eventually creating in-depth, feature-length films. She also asserted that given her curiosity in both film and science, there was no chance of her pushing science aside as a subject in her pieces in the future.

“I will be in science class and … my mind will be blown by the concepts we’re learning or the lab that we’re doing,” she said. “I want to share that excitement and what I learned with other people, and (I’ve) found the best way to do that has been through creating videos or documentaries.”

Bennett described her former student as incredibly unique, as Quintanar is one of the few students Bennett has taught during her career who is interested in making documentaries, which can be difficult.

Documentaries require interviewing many people who aren’t used to speaking in front of a camera and putting together an appealing product, but Quintanar loves the challenge, according to Bennett.

Bennett added that she has never seen anyone major in documentary filmmaking and molecular engineering, as Quintanar plans to do.

“Her next steps into the world are going to be incredibly important, because scientific discovery and scientific work needs to be understood by the public,” said Bennett. “That is her passion, to not only do the scientific work, but be the person that can explain it and explain why it’s important to the world through her documentary filmmaking.”