By Tamara Jackson
Staff photographer

Grand Rapids celebrated its first film festival this summer.

During that weekend of Aug. 26-29, Grand Rapids not only experienced one, but two film festivals back-to-back that were well received and attended by the public one being the Grand Rapids Film Festival.

“It was great to see that we are finally not only getting one, but two film festivals in the Grand Rapids area,” said Dave Anderson, Communication and Media Studies division chair at Cornerstone University, who attended the film festival. “They had a good combination of short films and had very heavy competition for them. They had film makers coming in as far as Atlanta Georgia and California.”

Sponsored by Storytelling Pictures, Celebration Cinema and WCSG, The Grand Rapids Film Festival was held in Celebration Cinema North movie theater from Aug. 26-28.

Attending the Grand Rapids Film Festival was Assistant Media Professor Pete Muir from Cornerstone. Muir also participated in a panel discussion during the festival with other people from Calvin, Ferris State, Grand Valley, Compass Arts and a few institutions.

“I think that perhaps one of the weaknesses here in Grand Rapids was that the film community seems a little fractured,” Muir said. “No one is really talking to anybody else about what the students are doing, and there are really no common venues to show films that are either created at an educational level or traditional festival mental films.”

Serving on a panel with six people from six different institutions, Muir described as a great chance to talk about film, the future of education, how other institutions run their programs and whether Cornerstone’s media department is on the right track.

During the festivals award ceremony on Friday night, the film receiving the award for best feature was “Like Dandelion Dust,” a movie based on a Karen Kingsbury novel produced by Kevin and Bobby Downes.

“It was a very powerful abdication of a Christian novel and it is winning festivals right and left,” said Anderson, who has known the Downes brothers from doing work in California.

Other films in the festival include “American Sailors,” directed by John Grooter and winner for best documentary. “White-Eyed Winter” and “Checkers” were directed by Cornerstone graduate, Brad Porter.

“I was looking for something to submit my short film, ‘Practical Truth’ to,” said Cornerstone film student Esmeraldo Baptista, who is an international transfer student from Portugal.

With the principles of the film festival being focused of family friendly, Baptista worked at the festival as a volunteer.

“One of the things I really enjoyed is that you did not have that wall separation between the filmmakers and the audience,” Baptista said. “I mean you could go up there and speak with them and they were willing to talk to us and explain more about their work, share their ideas and visions. You never know who is going to watch your movie.”

With being the first year of the festival, many of the categories for judging the films were left very broad in not forming separate categories based in length, budget and other filmmaking specifications.

“Festivals are a great chance to experience generally non-mainstream films,” Muir said. “I am a big encourager of getting away from the Hollywood block buster and seeing something that is a little more out of house. It is also great to hang out with other film people who generally go to festivals because they love films.”

Muir continued to explain that festivals also help to encourage students to strive in making a film that will have a life outside of the classroom and can have the chance to reach a wider audience other than their classmates and professors.

“There is a lot of potential for the Grand Rapids Film Festival to become larger, more diverse in its number of entrees, maybe more refined for its criteria for judging, but it is a great thing to continue conglomeration of the Grand Rapids film community,” Muir said. “It is just getting together and to celebrate, honor and be a part of the ambiance of film and storytelling.”