Tilting at cinematic windmills: La Mancha Film Festival features films by local high school students Tilting at cinematic windmills: La Mancha Film Festival features films by local high school students (May 14, 2001)

By Alan Sissenwein

Almanac Staff Writer

Cannes, the French town that hosts the world's most famous film festival, is getting some competition in Menlo Park.

April 28 marked the second annual La Mancha Film Festival, held in Menlo Park's Recreation Center, which features movies made by high school students and recent high school graduates.

Most of the films are made in the Bay Area, said Nathan Kitada and William Most, two seniors at Menlo-Atherton High School who are La Mancha's founders and organizers.

The festival's name comes from author Miguel de Cervantes' famous literary madman, Don Quixote de La Mancha. Don Quixote believed he was a knight and jousted with windmills, which he thought were giants.

Like Don Quixote, Nathan said, the festival tries to achieve lofty, seemingly impossible goals.

"It's the tilting at windmills idea," said Nathan.

Some 20 films were featured at this year's festival, and the Recreation Center was turned into a three-screen theater during the festival's three-hour duration.

The subject matters of the films varied greatly. For example, one short piece, "Hiatus" details a child's momentary mental retreat into a fantasy world in the wake of a traumatic car crash. By contrast, the movie "Dicks for Hire" is an unabashedly silly spoof of 1970s TV detective shows, complete with a hard-boiled investigator who sports a mushroom-like Afro wig and other fashions that helped make the era a by-word for tackiness.
Origins

The festival has its roots in an English class that Nathan and William took during their sophomore year. They were each assigned to write a play, and their plays were among eight that were later performed by TheatreWorks in Mountain View. Nathan's play, "Fighting the Enemy," is a fictionalized episode from his Japanese-American grandfather and Caucasian grandmother's post-World War II courtship.

But after "Fighting the Enemy" was staged, Nathan and William decided they wanted to film it. While making the movie, they received help from fellow students.

"We basically realized there was a large interest in film among students our age," William said, adding that local high school students had no venue , at the time, for showing their films to the public.

This realization led William and Nathan to found Quixotic Productions, the nonprofit organization that runs La Mancha. This year's festival cost about $3,500, William said. The Brandenburg Family Foundation awarded the festival a $2,500 grant, William said, and about $1,000 more came from a grant from the Menlo-Atherton Foundation for the Future.

A panel of five judges, including two film professionals, gave awards to the three movies they voted best in the festival. A people's choice award allowed the audience to select its favorite film.

This year, M-A graduate Alex Weed won first place as a joint award for his four films that were screened at La Mancha. His film "The Wink" also won the people's choice award. The short movie is a comic, cautionary tale about the pitfalls of flirtation.

"Dicks for Hire," directed by Menlo School student David Nemetz, took second place, while "Hiatus, directed by M-A graduate Kenny Meehan, took third place.
Democraticizing film

Nathan noted that most of the festival's films were shot using digital cameras, which make it easy to make movies on a low budget.

"It's sort of democratized film making," he said, noting that "Fighting the Enemy" was shot for $300. William and Nathan have since completed two other movies. "Marital Bliss" takes a look at an explosion of tensions between a husband and wife. "The Chaser," based on a short story by John Collier, is about a man who purchases a love potion. All three of their films were featured at this year's festival, but they were not entered into the awards competition to avoid a conflict of interest.

Matt Thomas, an Atherton resident who worked in the movie industry for 15 years and served as one of the festival's judges, noted that the student films were edited with the same technological skill that would have been seen in a major television studio 10 years ago. Mr. Thomas said that editing can today be performed on $2,000 home computers that would have required $100,000 equipment a decade ago. Similarly, he said that the students' cameras, which cost about $1,000, can do the same work that a $10,000 camera did about a decade ago.

Mr. Thomas said these advances allow students to make professional quality films.

"It is stunning," he said.
The festival's future

Next year, Nathan will be attending Yale University and William will be attending Harvard University, but the duo wants to ensure La Mancha continues without them. Their friends Travis Schoen and Ryan Wackerman, who are juniors at M-A, and Diana-Lee Brandenburg, who attends Castilleja School in Palo Alto, plan to carry on the tradition.

"I'm pretty excited about it," said Travis, who has been making films since his freshman year and served this year as one of the festival's judges. "It's more like a producer's role than an editor's."

Two of Travis' films were shown at La Mancha this year. The campy "Ball of Evil" features a malignant orb rolling around Stanford University. "The Beckers" is an animated short which, according to La Mancha's program, "addresses the effects of cannibalism on your teen."

Travis noted that he intends to pursue a career in filmmaking, but hasn't yet decided what area he'll specialize in.

Nathan also said he plans to make movies professionally.

"I have not yet decided what arena I'm going to battle in," he said, adding that he could go into acting, producing, or directing.

William, however, said he will study biology and is thinking of becoming a marine biologist. In the meantime, William and Nathan are planning to film a movie called "Unorthodox," a farce in the Mel Brooks-Monty Python vein that would feature a priest, rabbi and minister who sing and dispense vigilante justice.

But whether the students who submitted entries to La Mancha wind up making films professionally or not, Mr. Thomas said that he was impressed by the labor that must have gone into the making of their films.

"Who knows if it's ever going to be their career, but in the meantime they dedicated their passion to their movies," he said.