Lights, camera, action!

The Hayward Area Historical Society, in partnership with the Tennyson High School Community Multimedia Academy, will hold the first student film festival tonight for free at 5 p.m.

Two years ago, Tennyson High School teacher Jaynee Ruiz and Hayward Area Historical Society Education Director Brenda Salguero thought about holding a student film festival in Hayward, but never received the opportunity to do so.

Salguero explained that while the film festival has been a long-term dream, she and Ruiz have only been planning the event for about two months since funding came through.
This year’s film festival was possible due to a mini-grant from the San Francisco Foundation.

“Every year, I was privileged enough to view some of these films and they were amazing,” said Salguero.

“Every time I saw one of the students films I was always blown away by how talented these high schoolers were. I just want others in the Hayward area to have the same opportunity to be blown away like I was.”

The Hayward Film Festival will feature works from students who are under the age of 21 and enrolled in any school in the Bay Area, which includes junior high schools, high schools, junior colleges and colleges.

Salguero, who is in charge of preparing the HAHS building for the event, explained that the venue will be transformed with a large screen along with a multitude of audio and visual equipment that will make the experience similar to a movie theater.

Besides a movie theater feel, the HAHS café will be open for event attendees to grab a snack before and during the film festival.

While the festival will be held at the HAHS, collaboration with Tennyson High School Community Multimedia Academy is what makes the event possible as the academy is in charge of all film submissions.

According to their website, Tennyson High School CMMA is a small learning community that integrates computer technology, multimedia, social justice issues and community services.

The Academy students works closely with a team or teachers for three years and while they meet all college entrance requirements they learn many platforms of multimedia skills.
The main event coordinators for the festival, Ruiz and Sandra Navarro, are both Hayward teachers who work directly with CMMA.

Ruiz and Navarro will also choose what films will be shown during the film festival today.

“We worked with Professor Stephen Cleveland from Cal State East Bay and Ya’Shalan Nelson, a film student at Sacramento State and a former CMMA student and Tennyson High Alumni,” Ruiz said. “They gave us their insight on the genres we should have since they have experience with film festivals.”

Each film submitted had to meet a few requirements, such as: submissions not in English must have subtitles, all profanity is discouraged, films should try to be no longer than five minutes and all music videos must contain only original music.

“If your film is awesome, but runs longer than 5 minutes, we want to encourage students to submit the film anyways,” said Salguero. “We don’t want to miss out on any fantastic films out there just because they’re a minute over.”

According to Ruiz, the festival received a little over 40 films and will be showing 33 of the films submitted. “We had to turn some films down that were over time and that used way too much profanity,” Ruiz said.

The Student Film Festival is ultimately an event for students to showcase their films, but in addition there will be a trophy for students who win different categories like best film, best comedy and best drama. Salguero hopes to make the student film festival an annual event. “This is just the first year, so we’re still working out some kinks.

If we have funding again though, we would love to do it next year,” said Salguero.