As both the ASUNM leadership, and as judges of the Cherry Reel Film Festival, we are incredibly impressed with the professionalism and creativity that our students show. ASUNM prides itself on its ability to constantly work harder and attempt to find a plethora of ways to serve the student population.
This past weekend, the Southwest Film Center did just that. The Center held its annual film festival, that has been renamed the Cherry Reel Film Festival, Saturday night. With 30 original submissions, 20 of which were screened, and a newly acquired sponsorship from Canon, which provided a Canon camera to the first-place entry, this festival proved to be a big success.
From the executive and planning side of this festival, we can tell you that the amount of work that William Dole and Molly Cudia, the Executive and Assistant Directors of SWFC, put into this event is beyond imagination. Weekly meetings with students, advisers, the staff and marketing director of SWFC and many individuals involved in the film industry both on and off campus, took up time each day. Setting up sponsorship worth hundreds of dollars, finding seven judges who come from both professional and student realms, marketing an old event with a new title and providing the premiere student film festival for UNM was not an easy feat, yet the staff of SWFC made it look easy.
Overall, the event ran smoothly, provided an opportunity for students’ work to be shown to the community and was an incredible opportunity for many of us to realize that UNM is filled with some of the most talented and dedicated individuals in this state.
As viewers at the Cherry Reel Film Festival, we were incredibly impressed by the talent we have at UNM. It’s rare — for us anyway — to see the art our students are making on campus in a very collective way, which is what we had the opportunity to do that evening. It was said best when the mission statement of the festival was introduced: We get stuck in the grind of academia and sometimes forget to notice and appreciate the beauty and creativity all around us.
Saturday night we saw our city, our local businesses and our students in a new light. We aspired to be something more than students: we wanted to be artists. The two of us submitted a faux entry into the film festival set to "Don’t Stop Believing,” and while it wasn’t planned at all when we made it because we mostly made it out of boredom on a layover, we realized that our poorly made iPhone music video echoed the sentiments we have toward art and toward our student body really doing what they love: “Don’t Stop Believing.”
We live in a world that sometimes values paper degrees more than knowledge or “real” jobs over jobs we love. As a generation shaping the future, we want to challenge ourselves and challenge those around us to break the mold and stop doing what we think we ought to do, but rather do what we feel compelled to.
Those who showcased their art Saturday did just that, and we were lucky to be mere spectators.
Jenna Hagengruber is the ASUNM president and Alex Cervantes is the vice president for the 2015-2016 school year.
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