The Oklahoma City University Film Department hosted a new film festival in OKC to showcase experimental films on Saturday, April 9 and Sunday April 20.
Wide Open Experimental Film Festival (WOEFF) took place at the Rodeo Cinema on Film Row, 701 W Sheridan Ave. and featured 63 short films for 20 countries selected from over 2,500 submissions, all picked with criteria made by the OCU Alternative Cinema class.
Billy Palumbo, the Visiting Associate Professor of film at OCU said, “a lot of people ask me to define experimental film, but it’s so wide-ranging. We’ve got films that are technically innovative and with mind-blowing imagery, we’ve got films that are personal explorations of memory and emotion, we’ve got films that are politically-minded and inspiring—there’s a little bit of everything in WOEFF.”
Palumbo claimed that the festival was created by OCU film students in the Alternative Cinema course after an assignment over experimental film festivals sparked the idea to create their own.
The Associate Professor and Chairman of the Film Department, Bryan Cardinale-Powell, was quoted in the same press release. He spoke about the festival as an extension of the program’s curriculum. “At OCU we help students shape a personal perspective on filmmaking and film culture. Based on the films our students selected for this festival, it’s clear they understand that film is an expansive idea that includes much more than mainstream movies,” Cardinal-Powell,
The press releases also included statements from OCU student Kat Shehan, a BFA Design and Production major, who said, “the two that resonated with me the most were ‘How I Choose to Spend the Remainder of my Birthing Years’ [dir. by Sarah Lasley] and ‘I sit and look out’ [dir. by Gábor Balázs]. They are both thought-provoking, personal, and powerful. And they are so different, too.”
“We had a ton of really unique films, for example, one of the films submitted, ‘Fragile Dream'[dir. by Isabelle Hayeur], used a slow, shifting focus to show off the subtle beauty of nature, and then another film, ‘Cactus Raptus’ [dir. by Maxime Hot] took the opposite approach by replaying harsh zooms into a cactus,” Paul Dower a BFA film production major said.
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