Films by Beacon students to be screened at festival
Three student-made movies are entered into RI teen film festival
WOONSOCKET – Liam Fifer’s short film “Coexist” opens with a young man walking through snowy woods to a clearing, lighting a match, and setting his birth certificate on fire. This document isn’t some prop crafted to look authentic: It’s Fifer’s real birth certificate, and so he had to get the shot right on the first try.
One thing Fifer, the fictional character of William, and the actor planning William, Hayden DuBois, have in common is that they’re all transgender men.
“I can’t stand the feeling of being two people. It’s like I’m watching home movies of somebody else’s childhood when I try to remember,” William says in the next scene. He’s talking to his therapist, and he says of the birth certificate bearing a traditionally female name, “I hate that birth certificate, always there, always splitting me right down the middle.”
In the present day, William goes home to a supportive partner, but the 12-minute film shows a series of painful flashbacks – about lack of familial acceptance – and William’s efforts to reconcile his past and present selves.
Fifer, a Cumberland resident, is one of three seniors at Beacon Charter High School for The Arts whose film is being screened at the 2017 GiveMe5 Teen Film Festival on Saturday, along with Kianna Gederman and Sebastian Gottschalk.
Their film teacher, Katie Reaves, selected their films as the three she could submit to the festival.
Creating “Coexist” involved “taking little bits from other people’s experiences and creating a narrative,” said Fifer, who came out as transgender just shy of his thirteenth birthday. “There isn’t one trans experience; there’s multiple of them.”
It’s a film about self-acceptance, and the medium is a fitting one for Fifer, who said his journey to selfacceptance has been fueled by art and film-making.
Most of the people on- and offcamera in his work are LGBT, Fifer said. Some of them he knows through his involvement with “What
I’m Made Of,” a documentary about transgender youth in Rhode Island.
Fifer is featured in the documentary, sits on the film’s advisory board, goes over rough cuts, and helped out with the Kickstarter.
He wrote the script for “Coexist” in one night, describing it as something that came out of nowhere. Fifer is headed to Maine College of Art in the fall, where he plans to study film.
His classmate Kianna Gederman, who will be attending the University of Rhode Island, isn’t sure what she wants to study but said she probably wants to either draw concept art for cartoons or write for films.
Gederman’s 5-minute film “Nightmare” is about a kid who is tormented by nightmares in which a dark, shadowy creature follows her around and she doesn’t know what to do.
“I’ve always been interested in dreams and the subconscious,” she said.
Her project features both drawings and live-action. In many films with dream sequences, she noted, real life is shot in live-action and the dream sequences are animated, but she decided to do it the other way around.
She drew the illustrations that set the scene for characters’ dialogue, while her cousins lent their efforts for voices during the waking parts and acting during the nightmares.
Gederman said she has always enjoyed watching the behind-the-scenes extras of movies and TV shows, and she began making short films with friends at age 11 or 12.
Sebastian Gottschalk, on the other hand, didn’t have an interest in filmmaking before starting the senior film class at Beacon.
“Heck, I didn’t even think twice about what goes through in making a movie, and the funny thing is I worked as a concessionist over at CinemaWorld,” he said. “I watched movies all the time and I just never thought about it.”
Passionate about animals, Gottschalk is entering a 15week veterinary assistant program at the Community College of Rhode Island next year and aspires to be a zookeeper. But he said if it wasn’t for his commitment to this career path, the film class would’ve made him want to go more in-depth with filmmaking.
(All seniors at Beacon take teacher Katie Reaves’ film class, and the school’s goal is for every senior to create a capstone film.)
Gottschalk’s “Homeless” follows a young girl – played by his 8-year-old sister – as she asks for money on the street, looks for scraps to eat, vomits and falls asleep on a bench. She has no speaking lines, with all of the sound in the black-andwhite film coming from Jason Berndt’s song “Spiritual.”
The idea for the film came one day when Gottschalk was going to Providence Place Mall and saw homeless people holding signs on every corner.
While Gottschalk has never lived on the streets, he had the experience of find- ing his home taken suddenly, and then entering a state of transition and impermanence with regards to housing.
He lived on Long Island in New York with his mother, brother and sister until Hurricane Sandy destroyed their home. The family crashed with friends in Connecticut for a little bit before moving in with Gottschalk’s grandparents in Rhode Island, where they lived until just a few weeks ago.
“Coexist,” “Nightmare” and “Homeless” will all screen at the ninth GiveMe5 Teen Film Festival, which is being held at at the Greenwich Odeum in East Greenwich on Saturday from 7 to 9:30 p.m.
The guest emcee for the event is Robert Capron, Jr., a Providence native who played Rowley Jefferson in the first three “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” movies and Jack Black’s son in “The Polka King.” His co-emcee is Sarah “Sky” Tanner, this year’s recipient of the Extraordinary Woman for the Future award from the Woman Development Institute.
There will also be a professional panel providing feedback on the student films. This includes Rhode Island Film and Television Office director Steven Feinberg, WPRI producer/editor Adam Theroux, and arts educator and photographer Yin Yefko.
The education program of the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts is the sponsor of GiveMe5.
Along with the screening of short films, the festival will be screening – on a smaller monitor – 1-minute films made by students from the Teen Film Lab.
Katie Reaves, the film teacher at Beacon, has been involved with GiveMe5 since its inception. From the start, the focus has been on screening, not on awards.
“There was a decision a long time ago that we would focus on highlighting and showcasing,” Reaves said. She commented that filmmaking is “such an amazing medium for expression, for study, for research,” noting that it combines technology, creativity, liberal arts, analytical thinking and more.
Michael Skeldon, now CEO of Beacon, developed the school’s film program in 2006, and Reaves has been at the school for five years.
Follow Erica Moser on Twitter @Erica_Faith13