5-08-2023 8:35am

Alamogordo Students Win Awards at Desert Light Film Festival

Chris Edwards Editor

This past week, Alamogordo Public School Students from Alamogordo High School submitted work, attended the Desert Light Student Film Festival. Several students were recognized for excellence and won awards. They all worked really hard and earned their results. Congratulations to each winner.

A total of 147 films were submitted to the competition from across the state this year. There were more than 400 middle and high school students assembled here in Alamogordo for the 20th Anniversary of Desert Light Student Film Festival.

The Alamogordo students won awards in 6 of the 7 categories in the high school division. CONGRATULATIONS TIGERS!!

All of the winning films and other productions from this year are available on our Youtube Channel > AHS Tiger Film. (https://www.youtube.com/@AHSstudentfilm)

Halen McSpadden and Peyton Starkovich

1st place - Drama Category "Faun"

Madeline Bermudez, Briar Kangas, Lilly Carrell, and Noah Mote

2nd place - Music Video Category "Goodbye, Earl"

Kyle Winship and Tomas Bernal

1st place - Documentary Category "The La Luz Pottery Factory"

Aidan Champagne

2nd place - Documentary Category "The Jackson House"

Hayden Thomason-Rucker, Tristan Pederson, and Jaye Weaver

2nd place - Experimental Category "The Shopping Cart"

Andrew Ruiz and David Del Rio

1st place - Animation Category "Art School"

Savannah Lane, Jordan McCombs, Maysun Foley, Chandler Guillory, Jeum Campugan

Winners of the Sunshine Award for a film depicting overcoming tragedy or adversity.

Alamogordo High School is to be congratulated for having an active film class and an educational team that is committed to providing opportunities for these students. Film production and entertainment is a fast growing segment of industry within New Mexico.

The Desert Light Film Festival was the first statewide film competition in New Mexico aimed at middle school and high school students. The festival and competition has been growing since it first began in 2004 and a record number of films entered this year from schools across the state including Albuquerque based schools Sandia Prep, Public Academy for the Performing Arts, Desert Academy and DATA charter school, Alamogordo High School, Deutsche Schule, Chaparral High School, Las Cruces High School and Mayfield High School among others.

Other upcoming New Mexico Film Festivals include

Dates: Open Submissions until July 28
Location: Madrid, NM

Information: All of New Mexico’s aspiring and established filmmakers are invited to submit a film for consideration in the Madrid Film Festival. As of May 1, 2023, the festival will accept short films (twenty minutes or less) which were created over the past year in New Mexico. The submission deadline is Friday, July 28th.

The festival is proud to offer monetary prizes: $500 cash awarded to the film that wins the Festival’s grand prize, Le Palme d’Coal, and $500 cash awarded to the film that wins the best local Madrid film prize, the “Oscar” Huber.

Go to madridfilmfest.org to submit.

The screening will be held at the Engine House Theater in Madrid on the weekend of September 8-10, 2023.

Contact Name: Andrew Wice
Contact Phone: 5054241065

Dates: June 2-4 & 16-18, 2023
Time: TBA
Location: Albuquerque, NM

Information: The first goal of the Fronteras Micro-Film Festival is to re-imagine the short film festival. We aim to give filmmakers and audiences an experience that emerges from, and supports, short film. To do so, we are creating (1) a unified context for the films with a strong theme, and (2) we are supporting a decentralized, viewer-driven, immersive viewing experience.

The second goal is to provoke public conversation about borders. Dust Wave will solicit thirty second to three minute-long films, from local and international filmmakers, that address themes of borders, enforcement, and crossings. We will select twenty-five films for festival screening.

Borders structure life for billions of people globally. Borders are also relevant to Dust Wave's members. We are a majority Latinx group, comprised of immigrants and non-immigrants who live near the U.S.-Mexico border. As such, we see around us the rising tide of nationalism and xenophobia. In shooting a recent project, a documentary on the International Dark Sky Reserve (IDSR) along the border, we were moved by the capaciousness of the natural world -- the boundless sky and desert. This ecosystem presents one vantage point that reveals national borders as recent, artificial, and intrusive artifacts.

Fronteras will feature a series of interactive installations that speak to the border's artificiality and dire consequences upon human life and the natural world. Some installations will invoke unwanted stops in a migrant's journey, including border walls, detention centers and trailer transport. Others will conjure state surveillance apparatuses of cameras and guard posts. Still others will engage the beauty and awe of the remaining untouched natural landscapes of the Mexico-U.S. border.

https://fronterasmicrofilm.com/

Contact Name: Alonso Indacochea
Contact Email: alonso@would.productions
Contact Phone: 505.226.6515

Location: Albuquerque

Information: Filmmakers! Do you have a creepy film you’d like to submit? Submissions for 2023 are open!

Horror films have an undeniable place within film culture and we find it important to celebrate that by offering a serving of dark, weird, and undeniably creepy short and feature films.

Dark Red Film Fest is created by filmmakers, for filmmakers, with the aim to connect and build a dynamic community cultivating both indie filmmaking and horror fandom all in one place.

Taking place in October 2023, the second annual Dark Red Film Fest will feature horror films from New Mexico and beyond, as well as including other horror and filmmaker focused activities.

https://www.darkredhorror.com/film-fest

Contact Name: Tabitha
Contact Email: Tabitha
Contact Phone: 4052481041