Tyler Pedersen, film senior, will attend one of the world’s largest and most prestigious film festivals this summer.
Pedersen will intern at the Cannes Film Festival from May 6-19 in Nice, France. His flight leaves hours after graduation.
Cannes Film Festival is an annual event in which figureheads of the film industry gather to screen, distribute and purchase films.
“It started in France as an attempt at world peace after France got its shit rocked by Germany,” Pedersen said. “Basically, it’s a combination of the Boyhood filmmaker dream and bougie capital.”
The most prestigious award at the festival is the Palme d’Or, which is given to the best submission in various genres and lengths of film. Awards are chosen by a panel of actors, filmmakers and other industry professionals. Actress Cate Blanchett will lead the panel this year.
“Lots of significant directors have won the Palme d’Or, like Scorsese, the Coen Brothers, Ford Coppola, and Tarantino,” Pedersen said. “I don’t know what I’d do if I met Tarantino. If I meet Quentin Tarantino, I hope he slaps me and I slap him back.”
Each country participating in the festival has a Pavilion. Pavilions are organizations in charge of making travel and lodging arrangements and providing badges to get into the festival. There are two types of internships through the Pavilion. The first employs interns at coffee bars, registration and other jobs in the Pavilion. The second option outsources interns to talent agencies, distribution companies and production companies. Pedersen chose the latter option.
“I’ll be put with a production or distribution company, but I won’t find out any more details until the end of April,” he said. “I’ll work six or seven hours a day, five days a week for the first two weeks, but most companies go home the last week, so I’ll have some extra time to hang out in France and watch movies.”
Pedersen said he listed a small or medium sized company as his preference over a large company like Sony or Disney.
“The smaller companies make movies I’m interested in working on, like Lady Bird, The Florida Project and Call Me By Your Name,” he said. “I’m also more likely to get a job offer with those companies. Lots of interns get hired by tiny businesses like a family-owned Belgium production company that takes you back to Belgium for a year.”
Working overseas in a position that provides in-depth, artistic experience is much more desirable than a ladder-climbing situation at a huge American company, Pedersen said.
“I would absolutely chase the hypothetical Belgium family. I’ve been looking toward my 20s as being flexible and focused a lot more on experiences with a dash of reality, meaning I need a little income to survive,” Pedersen said. “I’d love to get a job through the festival and, at some point, make an income through an idea-based position like a writer’s room while working on passion projects.”
Tyler Pedersen, film senior, and Hannah Rogers, film junior, set up a camera to shoot Pedersen’s capstone film The Rift. Pedersen will present his capstone May 4 and fly to France for the Cannes Film Festival on May 5.
Pedersen is in the post-production phase of his senior capstone film The Rift. Filming the capstone involved three actors and 24 crew members in Davis, Oklahoma. The music for the film is composed and recorded by Annie Oakley, a local band featuring Grace Babb and Sophia Babb, mass communications juniors.
“It’s about a brother who doesn’t understand his sister and is pushed to the furthest point he can stand. It follows three characters in a dysfunctional family and a post-apocalyptic situation,” Pedersen said. “I’m a fan of the idea of a peaceful apocalypse, so far from the point our world ended that there’s no backlash. It’s a restart for humanity.”
The film covers themes of family, a sense of belonging, wonder, and a sense of sublime, Pedersen said.
“I got inspiration from images of single people standing in vast landscapes,” he said. “Through a self-destructive journey of screenwriting in my capstone planning class, I realized it’s about my own dysfunctional family problems. I had an early angst draft that wasn’t focused on sharing a feeling, which is what I want to do.”
Mary McLain, film junior and crew member for The Rift, said she was grateful to be a part of such a passionate project.
“This is one of the most ambitious student projects I have ever witnessed, and it remained ambitious from the conception to this moment, even in its editing,” McLain said.
Pedersen’s professors will evaluate his capstone film at his jury May 4. Pedersen said he will bring the film to the Cannes Film Festival to show it off, but he will mostly enter it in student competitions.
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