Maine South, Maine East teams take top honors in Student Silent Film Festival

Two groups of Maine Township High School District 207 students took home top honors at the fourth annual Student Silent Film Festival for their films, “You Can Only Imagine” and “Prometheus Bound” late last month.

Eleven high schools participated in the festival, which took place at the Tivoli Theater in Downer’s Grove Jan. 25, according to a press release.

The two groups of students, one from Maine South High School and one from Maine East High School, put their films together over a period of about a month, their teachers said. Each picture is about six minutes, according to the instructors who supervised the projects.

Maine East, Maine South and Lyons Township High Schools each won the festival’s Outstanding Achievement in Cinema Award, with an equal ranking among the three.

At Maine East, ‘a very distinct vision’

Maine East Radio and Television teacher Phillip Ash described “Prometheus Bound,” the winning entry from a group of four Maine East students, as “definitely the most abstract and kind of the strangest” entry in the festival.

But the movie, which followed a young man pursuing the source of a mysterious white light and eventually losing his mind, worked because its director, Andre Larios, had “a very distinct vision for what he wanted,” Ash said.

“Andre was thinking about Greek mythology and Prometheus being forced to hold up the sky because he was trying to steal powers from the gods,” Ash said.

Ash said a major influence on the film was the 2019 horror thriller, “The Lighthouse,” starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. Like “The Lighthouse,” “Prometheus Bound” was shot in black and white, Ash said.

And “unlike the other entries in the festival, the film wasn’t in a 16 by 9 format. Andre wanted to film in a 4 by 3 [format] that has an old school, almost television look to it.”

The result was “a very abstract piece of work, but it was also really brilliantly done and I’m very proud of the team for putting that together,” Ash said.

Director and writer Andre Larios, assistant director Quintin Lasky, animation and graphics maker Mark Lazo and actor Jonathan Mathew are all enrolled in Ash’s Advanced TV and film class. All are seniors with the exception of Lazo, a junior.

At Maine South, ‘collaboration and understanding’

“You Can Only Imagine,” the winning entry from a group of 11 Maine South High students, came together in between bursts of activity for the school’s variety show.

Teacher Mason Strom said many of the students who worked on the picture were involved in other programs throughout the Fine Arts Department at Maine South, making time management to produce and edit the film a challenge.

“We were legitimately here until 9:30 a few nights in the first week of December,” Strom said.

The film follows “a young man who is going to have a girl that he likes over on a date at his house and he’s going to cook dinner for her,” Strom said. “He’s got some obsessive compulsive tendencies and some anxiety, so the film is him imagining all the things that could kind of go wrong on this date and trying to play them all out ahead of time.”

Strom said the students produced the film over a seven-hour period the weekend after Thanksgiving in a marathon shoot that included an emergency run into Chicago to borrow a smoke machine from one student’s older sister, a film student at DePaul University.

Strom noted that the group behind “You Can Only Imagine” had “many different voices in the room.” Understanding among the members of the team was what allowed them to produce a quality movie on deadline, he said.

“Their ability to work together and problem solve and collaborate creatively, in a respectful manner, was really key,” Strom said.

Strom said he hoped his students took the values of collaboration and teamwork away from the project as well as recognition of their skills as filmmakers.

“Not every kid that comes into my class is going to be a filmmaker or a television broadcaster, but a lot of the jobs that I’m training these kids for don’t necessarily exist yet,” he said. “It’s all about learning skills like teamwork, collaboration and communication — not necessarily [whether] you can keep a camera shot in focus.”