This weekend the School of Theatre, Film & Television will host I Dream in Widescreen, the annual showcase of senior thesis films made by emerging filmmakers graduating from the School’s nationally ranked Film & Television program. The 19th edition of the event will take place at its traditional home, the Fox Tucson Theatre, on Saturday, May 4, at 7pm.
Senior filmmakers Jackson Huffman, Kat Kones, and Fiona Paskoff sat down with Mark McLemore, host of AZPM’s Arizona Spotlight, to talk about their upcoming senior thesis films.
“I wanted to make an Indiana Jones style movie … something like the natural adventure genre but then we pull it back and really let our character shine through,” said Jackson Huffman about his film Ricardo Rivera and the Mines of Montezuma. “Our characters are really funny, very relatable.”
“When it comes to jump scares, I think it’s about imagination and timing. [Leading up to the jump scare in the] first scene when she’s recording herself I just wanted it to be unsettling, you don’t expect it and then boom, it’s there.” said Kat Kones of her film Wandered Away. “I wanted to play on the theme of family, especially in horror, like we see in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Using a family as the villain was really important to me.”
“One of the influences for me when I was writing this film was a lot of the work by Celine Sciamma, the French filmmaker who tells really nuanced stories about women. I really love the way that her cinematographer shoots her films in a very natural way. I was also really inspired by Studio Ghibli films and how nature is used to externalize a lot of the internal emotion of the films.” said Fiona Paskoff when discussing her film Something Blue. “When I was writing this I really wanted to explore the traditional expectations around marriage that women have for each other within their families.”
These films, along with those of their ten peers, will premiere at I Dream in Widescreen on May 4 at the Fox Tucson Theatre at 7pm. More information is available at idiw.tftv.arizona.edu.
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