Amid thousands of films from around the world, including works from some of the top film schools in the United States, 17 Oklahoma short films were screened at the Clermont-Ferrand International Film Festival in February.
Those films will screen once again at 7 p.m. tomorrow in George Lynn Cross Hall.
Andrew Horton, film and video studies department director, and Paul Bell, dean of the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, visited the Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival in France last year and came back to Oklahoma with a desire to get OU students and Oklahoma filmmakers involved in the festival.
Horton and Bell heard about the film festival because Norman and Clermont-Ferrand are sister cities, said film and video studies professor Gary Rhodes.
"He and Dean Bell went to the 2002 festival and they learned on the ground what people know in print that this is one of the biggest short film festival in the world and OU needs to get a group of films over there," Rhodes said.
Three of the top-10 film schools in the country also participated in the festival.
OU media arts professor Heidi Mau, Rhodes and Horton reviewed short films made by media arts or film and video studies students, recent graduates from both programs and Oklahoma filmmakers last year.
They then selected the seventeen films that best represent Oklahoma filmmaking, display professional film qualities and make for a variety of film types, Mau said.
"We had anything from short film narratives to experimental to a documentary and there were even a few animated films," Mau said.
The professors chose "Johnny Modern" by Ricky Botchlet and and "Nest" by Mediea Herndon, both media arts seniors.
Herndon did not know in what competition she was entering when she gave her film to Mau, but she was surprised and honored to find that it would be screening at Clermont-Ferrand, she said.
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