School of the Arts’ alumni film And the Whole Sky Fit In the Dead Cow’s Eye won the International Jury Prize for Best Short at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. The film was written and directed by Francisca Alegría ‘16 and produced by Birgit Gernböeck ‘16.
The film tells the story of a village where some unlikely events occur. “The same day that 55 cows appear dead in a little Chilean Village, Emeteria (85) is visited by the ghost of her patron, Teodoro. She believes he has come to take her to the afterlife, but he has more devastating news.” The film has had a strong run thus far. It was awarded the 2016 NBR Student Grant, the Katharina Otto-Bernstein Award, and won two Jury Selects and the Audience Award at the Columbia School of the Arts Festival in New York.
Alegria’s feature screenplay, The Cow that Sang a Song About the Future, has also been accepted to the prestigious Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab. She’s developing her next script, “The Willow” in association with Jirafa Films, scheduled for fall 2017. This win continues Columbia University’s School of the Arts exceptional presence at Sundance Film Festival, which screened twenty films by Columbia affiliates this year.
As producer, Alum, Larissa Rhodes '14 also took home the Audience Award: U.S. Documentary for the documentary, Chasing Coral. The documentary is about the unprecedented vanishing of Coral reefs around the world. A team of divers, photographers and scientists set out on a thrilling ocean adventure to discover why and to reveal the underwater mystery to the world.
Columbia affiliates, Shrihari Sathe SOA '09, Co-producer, Eliza Hittman, SOA Adjunct, Writer/Director, and Joe Murphy SOA '08, Co-editor took home the Directing Award for an U.S. Dramatic, for the film Beach Rats. Beach Rats is about an aimless teenager who lives on the outer edges of Brooklyn, struggling to escape his bleak home life. He navigates questions of self-identity, while balancing his time between delinquent friends, a potential new girlfriend, and older men he meets online. Cast: Harris Dickinson, Madeline Weinstein, Kate Hodge.
