There are over 140 clubs and organizations at St. Thomas, with more being added by the semester. The Film Society is one of the university’s most recent additions, but students’ passion for film is nothing new.
University Archivist Ann Kenne said that St. Thomas students have set up different film clubs since the late 1940s. The most recent iteration, the Film Society, ended its initial run in March 2018.
“From what I recall, it was sort of a matter of students not taking the torch and running with it,” said James Snapko, the current Film Society adviser and Film Studies professor. “And then COVID hit.”
Snapko, along with junior Oliver Bahremand, initially restarted the club for one reason: computer lab access.
Bahremand, the president of the new Film Society, said that he was frustrated by the lack of lab access. St. Thomas students can use Adobe Creative Cloud and the editing labs, but they must be enrolled in a course that gives them access. As a club, though, Film Society is able to reserve the labs, allowing for more production time.
“My goal mostly was to get students to come together to work on projects together,” vice president and first-year Scott Leslie said. “The editing labs help too, because this is an industry where you need experience; you’re going to need to practice endlessly, so the editing labs help more students get hands-on experiences.”
The ability to produce videos is also key for the Film Society because as Bahremand said, at the end of the academic year, students hope to have the chance to show off their work in a St. Thomas film festival.
“The work that people do really does deserve more attention and just people seeing them more, so that’s another goal of it, just to have that film festival so we can promote our students,” Bahremand said.
Leslie, who helps plan events like the film festival, said that he wants to make sure the club has a solid footing and then slowly take off. He said he wants the club to go where the original club went, and then do better.
“We had two goals: one, for the film majors to be involved, to help them with their goals to be in the industry, and then obviously just to get film enthusiasts to be a part of it too,” Leslie said. “It’s not really an exclusive club but more of an inclusive club, so I’m very glad to get this back and hopefully get to start seeing this club go somewhere.”
Film Society, along with film courses, allows students to write and produce their own work, some of which is intended to be shown in the festival.
“We’re designing classes to promote more creative production, more creative energy, around projects that tell stories and that try to reach an audience in a way that they can connect to,” Snapko said. “It’s about sharing ideas and connecting through the ways film expresses itself. (The film festival) is a great opportunity for students to take that opportunity and showcase their talent.”
The plan is for the film studies department and the Film Society to work in tandem to produce the festival. The idea originally came from a filmmaking class, which teaches students how to run a production and tell stories that are meaningful to them. Their completed work is projected in one of St. Thomas’ auditoriums at the end of the course.
Though the film festival is its end goal, the club is focusing on other programming throughout the year.
“What we’re working on now is having the film news of the week, like cinema news of the week,” Bahremand said. “We have a collaboration on Abraham Bridge that is coming up, and we’ve been asked to make a movie for one of the offices on campus, the Office of International Students and Scholars.”
Additionally, the club is planning to volunteer at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival. Bahremand said that some club members are also willing to be actors in other student productions or to read and workshop scripts.
“We’re just trying to push the creative and production aspect of it really, and also we’re just here to be a source for students,” Bahremand said.
Snapko said that the department is also trying to start more classes so that students have opportunities in courses as well as extracurriculars.
In the fall, Snapko said there will be a new cinematography and lighting course taking up the first half of the semester, with a post-production course to follow, allowing students to both shoot and develop their film in a more nuanced way.
“Film touches everybody in some way, and on top of that, media literacy couldn’t be any more important,” Snapko said. “Understanding how to be expressive visually, to be expressive through image and sound, is as important as it gets to communicate to people.”
Bridget Schmid can be reached at schm1520@stthomas.edu.
