CMU I ♥ YOU

Tonight I went to the CMU I ♥ YOU film festival, held under the big tent as part of Carnival. Terri invited me because she co-directed one of the films.

All of the films were made by CMU students in the film club, based somehow on the theme of love, and they were varying degrees of good. Most were well done enough to be appreciated without being so amazing as to be scary. Some were a bit dull, including one about a boy who has a crush on a girl, so he writes her a note and leaves it in her text book but then - gasp! - she comes back with her boyfriend. Sadness.

But my favorite was called Untitled. It was the only one called Untitled. Figures.

Untitled begins with a girl standing against a wall. You can only see her face. The picture is black and white, and her eyes look like two bright white holes. She stares at the camera for a while and then begins to speak, but you don't hear what she's saying, just creepy music. The rest of the video is startling and disconcerting overlays of streets and lights and colors and the profiles of two faces moving in and out of each other, always layered over the girl's face as she talks and talks about something you can't hear. At the end she falls silent.

Chemists was artistic and well done visually, a lot of wide shots of stairs and walls. Tale of Two Majors was a rather amusing sort of Romeo and Juliet story about a drama student dating a CS major. Map Time was a cute and well done animated piece about some book characters fighting over a female tennis player in a magazine. Morning After was a narrated story about an apathetic couple set to artistic shots around campus.

I froze, but I enjoyed the films.