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Lucia Robinson sat, rattled by nerves, and dissected “every little thing wrong with” her short film, “Better Than Here.” After all, this was a real theater—AMC25 in Times Square—and this was a real audience.“I kind of just didn’t want to look at it,” Lucia said. “It can be a little bit anxiety-driven every time you watch it, but it was still pretty fun. And I was surrounded by my friends ... People seem to enjoy [‘Better Than Here’] and understand it, which is all you really want to happen after you make it.”
Lucia is not a professional filmmaker but rather a high school student and, more specifically, one of four Ross School students who placed at the second annual New York Alliance Film Festival.
The festival, which showcases work from independent high school students throughout New York State, includes five categories: Animation, Documentary, Experimental, Narrative Long Form and Narrative Short Form. Judges have two criteria: All submissions must be created by ninth through 12th grade students and have sub-10-minute run times.
Films that placed first through third in their respective categories were screened at the AMC25 theater in Times Square on Monday, May 22.
“It was probably one of the coolest moments in my life,” Alex Lawson, a Ross School senior whose winter surfing mini-documentary, “Off-Season,” won first place in the Documentary category, said in an email. “I really enjoyed hearing people’s reactions toward my movie, and it is so nice to see people actually really enjoying what I made.”
A surfer of four years himself, Alex takes inspiration from the popular productions made by the likes of John John Florence and Kelly Slater. But his interest lay in a more niche subset: remote and frigid surfing—what motivates someone to “do something so crazy and what makes surfing in the winter so beautiful.”
“[M]y first time surfing was in the summertime at Ditch Plains. I remember standing up on my first wave there and being completely hooked,” Alex said. “I love how big the waves got in the winter and how cold it was at the same time. My favorite time to surf is when it’s snowing. Everything is so silent, and the waves are usually the best after or during a snowstorm.”
The other two Ross representatives are Jonas Linman Feuerring, who placed first in the Experimental category with his film “Fiji,” a cultural exploration that dawned from a Ross field academy trip to the island; and Mingwei Gao, who placed second in the Animation category with her film “Multiplicity: A Day of a DID Patient.”
Each of these students studied under film teacher Ivan Salcedo, and their praise for him was plentiful.
“I felt if I needed help, I could go to him, but at the same time I knew I wouldn’t get an answer right away,” Lucia Robinson said. “He would definitely make me think for it, which proved to be very helpful in the end. He’s a good teacher in that sense; he makes you work for what you’re going to do.”
“Better Than Here” blends together two of Lucia’s prevailing interests: psychology and filmmaking. By conducting interviews with her friends who suffer from depression, consulting with an adolescent psychologist, and poring over Andrew Solomon’s novel “The Noonday Demon” (“the bible on depression,” she said) Lucia crafted a “narrative story that sort of encompassed everything that I learned” about teenage depression.
“Growing up, my dad studied film at college, and then he never really did anything with it,” she said. “It was just something that was talked a lot about. We watched tons of movies. It’s something that’s been kind of just part of me for a very long time, so I wanted to do something combining my two interests.”
And these two interests may eventually translate into a career for Lucia, who will be attending Wesleyan University this fall. “I’m definitely going to start off with some film classes,” she said. “At the moment, I really do love film and psychology. I don’t know if those are the two I’ll stick with. Going in, I’ll try and we’ll see if it works out.”
Joseph Shaw, Executive Editor on May 30, 2017