Images Cinema hosted the first Berkshire Student Film Festival, screening 19 student-made films before a jury of six filmmaking experts from the Berkshire region on Saturday May 4. After the jury deliberated, Dear Mr. L by Myla Doughtery ’26 received the award in the non-narrative category and In For Rubble by Robin McDonald won in the narrative category. 

The festival was the brainchild of Images Cinema board member Kevin O’Rourke as a way to strengthen the connection between schools in the Berkshires and the larger film community in the area. The festival was set in motion at the beginning of this school year by Images Executive Director Dan Hudson and Managing Director Janet Curran, alongside an engagement committee of students from Bennington College, Buxton School, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and Williams College. 

Student collaboration was seen as crucial to the development of the event from the beginning. “Our vision was to draw together students from across the Berkshire region and see their work up on the big screen,” Hudson wrote to the Record. “We’ve had success since I’ve taken the reins at Images in engaging the Williams student body more deeply and more frequently for our regular programming, but it’s more exciting to co-create a peer-to-peer opportunity like this among students to see their work.”

Organizing the festival required a year of planning between the Images directors, the student committee, and the College’s student interns — Emma Hennessy ’26, Minnie Lerner ’27, and Grace Newman ’26. Hennessy and Newman were hired by Images at the beginning of the school year as student engagement interns, while Lerner was a Winter Study intern tasked specifically with helping the development of the festival. The student committee was tasked with devising submission criteria, designing posters, and reaching out to small businesses to help sponsor the event. Lerner helped assemble the committee of jurors, while Newman and Hennessy were responsible for advertising the festival at the College.

Along with Hudson and Curran, a group of eight interns from the student committee evaluated the film submissions, of which Hudson noted that there was a significantly higher number than expected. 

“I think the biggest surprise for me was just the number and quality of submissions we got, knowing that this was our first year and we really didn’t have any budget to produce this festival — so it was all word of mouth,” Hudson said.

When deciding which film submissions to accept, Lerner said she focused on quality. “A factor that I weighed … was effectiveness and persuasiveness, like how well did this film do what it was trying to do,” Lerner said. “As a very pleasant surprise, the majority of films were very effective at doing all the things it set out to do, entertaining and informing and making one laugh and cry… They’re all just incredibly effective works.”

The range and caliber of the submissions presented challenges in putting together the program. “We had a rule that nobody could have more than one film in the festival, which was hard because, at times, we said, ‘All these movies are great,’ and then it was a question of which to include,” Newman said, adding that the screening committee prioritized variety. “There was one person who had a bunch of really great films, but they’d done a music video, and no one else had really done a music video like that, and we thought it was really cool, so we figured that one would be good to include.” 

The program featured three documentaries and three experimental or metric films in the non-narrative category, as well as seven drama or horror films and five comedies in the narrative category.

At the end of the film’s showings, Lerner announced the awards for Dougherty’s Dear Mr. L and Bennington College junior McDonald’s In for Rubble. 

Dear Mr. L is an exploration of the geographic and personal parallels between Dougherty and her grandfather’s life. “I made this film in my documentary filmmaking class last semester, which was a really reflective moment for me,” she said. “I’ve been making films throughout my life, but as a child, it never seemed that serious, so taking a filmmaking class was a really great experience for me.”

Elizabeth Cheng ’27 emphasized the festival’s value to her creative process. “The deadline for the film festival actually motivated me to film it and actually take the initiative to get it done,” Cheng told the Record. Her film The Same Conversation In Three Different Universes, an exploration of self and time based on her diary entries, was screened in the non-narrative category. “I would love to see a couple more categories, to see it expand.”

The festival demonstrated how student-run productions often face challenges due to limited resources. For instance, the creators of Rabbit Punch, Jack Allen Greenfield ’27 and John Sanchez ’27, were forced to adapt their script last-minute when their main actor contracted COVID-19. “We lost a whole lot of that content, so we rewrote the entire plot,” said Ben Davis ’27, who operated the camera for the film.

Yet these limitations gave rise to surprising innovations. The film Wanna Play? created by Adalei LaConte, a student from Burr and Burton Academy, made use of a doubling technique to create a young boy’s doppelganger, and in Robin McDonald’s winning film, they used saturated colors and the rattling voice-over to represent the infiltration of the dystopian world. “I really hope people see the festival as an opportunity to see some cool student work and realize that you don’t need a massive budget and a million dollars to make something cool,” Newman said.

Both Curran and Hudson, as well as the student interns, hope that their work has laid down the infrastructure to continue the festival in coming years, providing a platform for students in the Berkshire region to showcase their art.

“We hope this can become a new annual event that can grow in submissions,” Hudson said. “If we were to receive further funding we would hope to do things like award prize packages and have more dedicated outreach to find as many talented filmmakers to highlight as possible.”