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(from left) Columbians Joan Stein, Alison McDonald, and Ted Kim have won Directors Guild of America Student Filmmaker Awards
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Columbia film students Alison McDonald, Ted Kim, and Joan Stein have been named recipients of the Directors Guild of America's Sixth Annual East Coast Student Filmmakers Awards, winning in three of the four award categories. This is the second time in three years that Columbia University's School of the Arts Film Division has received significant recognition for the excellence of its students and program from the Directors Guild of America (DGA); in 1998, Columbia students swept all four of the prize categories.
The prestigious $2,500 East Coast Student Filmmaker Awards will be given to Columbia film students in the following categories: Best African-American Student Filmmaker was won by Alison McDonald for The Life and Times of Little Jimmy B.; Best Asian-American Student Filmmaker was won by Ted Kim for The Uncertainty Principle, and Best Woman Student Filmmaker was won by Joan Stein for One Day Crossing.
The fourth prize, for Best Latino Student Filmmaker, was won by Cristina Lois of the School of Visual Arts for "Anduriña."
The Directors Guild designed the awards to honor, encourage and bring attention to outstanding minority and women film students in East Coast film schools. The winners are selected by a panel of a dozen East Coast directors and are judged on the originality, creativity and artistry of their films.
Bruce Ferguson, dean of the School of the Arts, commented, "It is clear that the Film Division of the School of the Arts has arrived at a premier position in the nation for training filmmakers in all aspects of the creative process. We are thrilled for the students and look forward to watching them develop their careers, having already been recipients of such distinction."
Dan Kleinman, chair of the Film Division in the School of the Arts, said, "We're honored to receive this further recognition of the quality of our students' work. We are very proud of them and of our curriculum based on story."
Alison McDonald's tragicomedy, The Life and Times of Little Jimmy B., which she wrote and directed, depicts an episode in the childhood of an African-American writer in Depression-era Harlem. McDonald says, "As Jimmy B. explores the demimonde of a SRO, he comes to learn that the only worlds in which he truly belongs are the ones he creates with words."
Ted Kim's The Uncertainty Principle (written and directed by Kim) is a dark comedy set in a diner featuring two young lovers looking for a sign, one dying man, three checabana shirts, and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
Joan L. Stein, a 2000 MFA graduate of Columbia's School of the Arts, has already won several major awards for One Day Crossing, her Columbia Masters Thesis film, which she directed and developed. The 25-minute film tells the story of a young family living in Budapest during the last phase of World War II and was inspired by the experiences of her family. It was shot on location in Hungary.
In addition to the Directors Guild of America's East Coast Student Filmmaker Award for Best Woman Student Filmmaker, Stein recently won the Gold Medal for best narrative film at the Annual Student Academy Awards as well as the Directors Guild of America's Student Film Award (a separate honor from the DGA East Coast award named above, it is administered through the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) for One Day Crossing. The film was also selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art for inclusion in the prestigious New Directors/New Films series (it was one of 11 short films selected from a field of more than 400). In addition, Stein's film was named Best Film of the Columbia University Film Festival and awarded a prize by the National Board of Review.
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