It’s hard to believe that the University of Winnipeg Student Film Festival is celebrating its 10th anniversary this April - mostly because few festivals in the city have lasted as long.

The Winnipeg International Film Festival existed a measly two years, while the National Screen Institute, the longtime front-runner for local film fests, went online a few years back. Only the Gimli Film Festival (at 12 years) has been going on longer than U of W’s.

This particular festival has come a long way since its inception.

“I started it the second year I was here,” says John Kozak, head of the U of W film department. “It was just U of W films and was held in the Bulman Centre. Most of the films were on VHS projected onto a sheet. The sound system kept breaking down. We even had a few films submitted on 16mm, so we had to get a 16mm projector.”

After opening up submissions province-wide and shifting locations to Eckhardt-Gramatté Hall in 2004, where the festival still resides, things began to run much more smoothly.

Over the course of the Wednesday and Thursday (April 25-26) of the three-night event, approximately 30 films will screen.

You can catch the awards on Friday night (April 27), along with screenings of the winning films, the Advanced Filmmaking students’ film Made for Each Other, an open-bar reception and guest speakers Matt Kennedy and Adam Brooks of film collective Astron-6. Their recent film, the gore-comedy Father’s Day, was funded and distributed by Troma.

“Matt had films in our festival four or five years in a row,” Kozak says. “I thought it was interesting that with the 10th anniversary we have someone who went through our program and submitted to our festival and now has an internationally released feature on (his) hands.”

Kennedy and Brooks will take part in a Q&A and join the ranks of Deco Dawson, Guy Maddin, Sean Garrity, Jeff Erbach, Shereen Jerrett, Gary Yates, John Bernard, James Rewucki and Mike Maryniuk as guest speakers at the festival.

“The U of W Film Festival was something that I looked forward to every spring,” Kennedy says. “No matter how much we planned ahead, we would inevitably end up being awake for three days straight before the submission deadline. I can vividly remember watching the export time on a project and counting the hours I had left to burn a DVD and drop it off at the office. Like all filmmaking has, I’m sure those days before submission took a few years off of my life.”

“Having the film screen at U of W was always a good eye-opener for us,” he adds. “It was a way to screen our film for an audience that had no prior attachment to the material. Before you do that, you really have no idea if your film is a hit or a miss. Anyone involved with a film will generally give it the upper hand, but a real audience won’t do it any favours. I think that is something that every filmmaker needs to experience and it was always something we looked forward to with nervous excitement.

“To have screened our films there, and not only have the audience embrace them but to also have them awarded on multiple occasions, was a terrific experience and the first feeling of accomplishment for me as a young filmmaker.”

Past guests Sean Garrity (Zooey and Adam) and Jeff Erbach (The Nature of Nicholas) also took a moment to reflect on the festival.

“That festival is great,” Garrity says. “You really get a chance to see what our community will be making in five years by checking out work at the U of W Film Festival.”

Erbach is equally as enthusiastic about the work coming from the young filmmakers.

“Like a spring in a delicate timepiece, the festival acts as the most precious piece to the workings of a larger mechanism,” he muses. “Without it, without the exhibition opportunity afforded those pioneers of time, without the chance to bear witness to those things that offer such a delicious look into Winnipeg as a future city, the forward march of film, video and time-based media would halt.”

“I hope it’s become something that film students are aware of and recognize,” Kozak says. “I hope that not just U of W students, but that high school students who are interested in taking film in university, are aware of our festival, anticipate it and plan to go and plan to submit. I’m hoping that we can become a known factor around town.”

With 80 to 100 films submitted each year, only a third of them will be screened.

“Now we just wait for all the films to come floodin’ in,” Kozak says.

Submissions for the University of Winnipeg Student Film Festival are open to post-secondary students until Monday, April 9 at 4 p.m. All info is available at http://theatre.uwinnipeg.ca/filmfest.htm. The Festival will take place Wednesday, April 25 to Friday, April 27 at 7 p.m. nightly in Eckhardt-Gramatté Hall (3rd Floor, Centennial Hall) at the University of Winnipeg. All festival events are free and open to the public.

Published in Volume 66, Number 26 of The Uniter (April 5, 2012)