Columbia Films Screening This Weekend at the 2023 New Hampshire Film Festival; Two Films Bring Home Awards

Update: 

Two films by Columbia filmmakers brought home awards at the 2023 New Hampshire Film Festival, which wrapped on October 15th. 

Homing, written & directed by Ricardo Varona '22 and produced by Munir Atalla '23, was awarded Best Student Film. The short, which was made in collaboration with the pigeon breeding community of Brooklyn, tracks a gruff Bushwick pigeon breeder having to connect with his 13 year old daughter before she leaves the city for good.

The Fuse, written and directed by Kevin Haefelin '22, took home the Shorts Jury Award in the Live Action category, which is an academy qualifying award. The short narrates the story of a struggling senior garbageman who decides to hang-up on life after having been discarded from his job and embarks on a journey to find a fuse.

See a full list of 2023 winners here. 

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Original: October 13, 2023

The 2023 New Hampshire Film Festival will be taking place October 12–15 throughout downtown Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and several films by Columbia filmmakers will screen throughout the weekend.

This year's lineup represents a wide range of films, including recent international festival highlights from Cannes, Sundance, South by Southwest, Toronto, and Tribeca, as well as several films enjoying their world premieres. 

Columbia selections at the festival also represent a wide range of highly acclaimed films that have been shining on the festival circuit, like Children of Light, written and directed by Minkyu Kang '22 and produced by Kang and Bofan Zhang '21.

Children of Light screened last spring at the Columbia University Film Festival and was awarded the Focus Features Award for Social and Cultural Impact and a DGA Student Film Award. The film follows a young boy in 1960s South Korea who was kidnapped and assaulted at a juvenile center on a remote island. Now he must escape with his rival to survive.

Also screening this weekend is The Fuse, written & directed by Kevin Haefelin '22. The film, which also screened at CUFF and was shortlisted for a 2023  Yugo BAFTA student award, narrates the story of a struggling senior garbageman who decides to hang-up on life after having been discarded from his job and embarks on a journey to find a fuse.

Additionally, the festival includes the film Homing, written & directed by Ricardo Varona '22 and produced by Munir Atalla '23. It was a recipient of the Jack Larson Grant for Collaboration and the Film Fund Winter 2021 Funding Finalist. The film tracks a gruff Bushwick pigeon breeder having to connect with his 13 year old daughter before she leaves the city for good. This short was made in collaboration with the pigeon breeding community in Brooklyn.

The film Palm Sunday, written and directed by Wes Andre Goodrich '23, and produced by  Patrick Nichols '22, is also part of the selection. Inspired by true events, the film is a southern gothic drama about a young Black Caribbean immigrant who attempts to assimilate into an all-white church in 1970s Raleigh, North Carolina. The film was awarded the ACE Entertainment Award for Best Film at CUFF. 

Lastly, taking us to the shore of the west coast of Puerto Rico is the film Primos, directed by Ricardo Varona '22, co-written by Varona and Ida Yazdi '22, produced by Yazdi and Tony Yang '20. During a teenage road trip, 16-year-old Cristóbal begins to suspect that his crush, Yazmín, and cousin Marcos are secretly seeing each other.

Catch all these films and the rest of this year's stellar lineup by buying passes here.