Born in the basement of the Center for Continuing Education building, the Annual Student Film Festival now finds its home in the Debartolo Performing Arts Center (DPAC), filling each and every seat of the Browning Cinema with enthusiastic attendees.

Celebrating its 25th year, the festival featured selected films from students in introductory, intermediate and advanced filmmaking courses at Notre Dame. Thirty-one student filmmakers contributed their cinematic talents to produce the 14 multifarious films that appeared during the two-hour screening.

Ted Mandell, a Notre Dame film professor and founder of the festival, introduced the students’ films in a way that made audience members consider the discipline and thought that goes into the production of each film. He said, “If you want to think of them as homework, they kind of are.”

The atypical “homework” of film students does not resemble the usual three-page essay washed down with Au Bon Pain coffee the night before a due date. Students spend days planning and filming in order to develop thought-provoking, laugh-inspiring, chill-inducing films for their projects. Students featured in past festivals have gone on to win awards at Sundance and other highly respected film festivals.

Films were hilarious, dark, absurd and melancholy, often producing exciting fusions of genres. The festival launched and landed on a comedic note with the opening film “Chicks” and the closing film “My Neighbor Ned.”

Clare Stephens’ and Frank Schadt’s comedy “Chicks” was the first film to steal the audience away with a farm hijinks gone wrong, and Andrew Cheng and Marty Flavin’s parody “My Neighbor Ned” left audience members ironically giggling about zombies.

To offset warm feelings of hilarity with goose-bumps, “Lilith’s Game” (Anthony Patti, Johnny Whichard) proved that, with the filmmaking talents of Notre Dame students, it is possible for an 11 minute movie to send one cowering into a friend’s lap.

Other films were produced by students in a Documentary Video Production class, taught by Mandell. Documentaries including “The Last Free Place” and “Gimp” proved that Notre Dame film students do not see their work as mere entertainment, but as modes of influencing the world for the better.

One such documentary garnered the Audience Choice Award, for which audience members were encouraged via text message during the festival. Katie Mattie, Vincent Moore and Will Neal accepted the award for their powerful documentary, “The Suicide Disease.”

The film followed the life of Frances Shavers, who worked at Notre Dame as chief-of-staff and special assistant to University President Father John Jenkins, CSC, before being diagnosed with a horrifying disease. For three-and-a-half years, Shavers has battled trigeminal neuralgia, which has been nicknamed “the suicide disease” because 50 percent of those suffering it commit suicide within two years of being diagnosed.

Shavers and her husband welcomed Mattie, Moore and Neal into their home and their lives to form what Moore said would be a “life-long friendship” and what Mattie said would give her a lifetime of inspiration.

Shavers attended the festival with her husband, George Horn, viewing the film for what she said was only her third or fourth time.

“It’s hard to watch your life in front of you and see suffering come back to you in a visual way,” she said. “But, when we’d initially talk about it, I think what it did was capture exactly what I would want to communicate to the audience, and it was this juxtaposition between suffering and hope, or suffering and faith, and that they aren’t polar opposites. They don’t exist aside from each other, but they can coexist.”

In sharing her story with the student filmmakers, Shavers hoped that “if someone in that audience was suffering in some way, they didn’t feel alone.”

Will Neal expressed that the most challenging part of filmmaking was “turning 15 hours of footage into 15 minutes of film. I mean, you know what story you want to tell. You just don’t really know how you’re going to tell it until you sit down in the editing room.”

Mary Parent, a 1986 graduate of what was then Notre Dame’s “Communication and Theatre” (COTH) program, funds an endowment for the filming students of the FTT department and is continually amazed by the students’ “talent and generosity of spirit” every year she attends the film festival.

“If you’ve ever attended the Notre Dame Student Film Festival,” she attests, “you would certainly see that our young filmmakers are expanding their horizons and exploring their filmmaking dreams by making films that make a difference.”

After attending the film festival, one can say that the FTT major is one of Notre Dame’s most underrated academic programs. The film students have shown their vision and drive, and it will not be surprising to see their names on the big silver screen someday.

Victoria hopes to use her English and FTT majors to write a film raising awareness about the dangers of Notre Dame’s campus squirrels. If interested in producing this film, or in discussing the film festival, contact her at vvelasq2@nd.edu.