Two Columbia Films Show at Maryland Film Festival 2020

Two films by Columbia alumni and current students showed at the Maryland Film Festival from June 12 until June 21. Director, co-writer and co-producer Szu-Wei Chen celebrated the world premiere of his short film Last Day, co-produced by current student Tarek Aryani and co-written by current students Constance Tsang and Alex Yarber. It ran as part of the Exits & Entrances and the Shorts Premieres categories. Pillars, a short film written and directed by alumnus Cameron Bruce Nelson '20 and produced by alumna Chloe Sarbib '20 ran as part of the LGBTQ Pride Shorts program. 

In Last Day, as work continues on the border wall, a Chinese sex worker in New York gets surprising news from her visiting lover. Chen’s short will also screen at the Manhattan Film Festival in August. 

Pillars tells the story of a Mennonite woman who reverts to a secret language when her best friend begins the rites of marriage. The film previously showed at Slamdance 2020.

Szu-Wei Chen is a filmmaker originating from Taiwan, now based in New York City as he pursues his MFA in film from Columbia University. Having grown up with an interest in directors such as Edward Yang and Lou Ye, Chen is currently exploring a means to bridge the film language he grew up on with his experiences as an international student living in the US.

Cameron Bruce Nelson is a writer/director whose award-winning first feature, Some Beasts, was chosen to participate at the IFP Narrative Labs, the US in Progress-Wroclaw, and received an Austin Film Society post-production grant. He is a graduate of Black Factory Cinema's workshop with Abbas Kiarostami and is an MFA candidate in Screenwriting/Directing at Columbia University's School of the Arts, where he was awarded a Janowsky Screenwriting Fellowship. His producing credits include Frank Mosley's Her Wilderness and Daniel Laabs' Jules of Light and Dark, which won the Grand Jury Award for Outstanding Narrative Feature at LA Outfest and was the recipient of a SFFILM/Kenneth Rainin Filmmaking Grant. Currently, he is serving on the Austin Film Society's Film Advisory Committee and as a Teaching Fellow for Columbia's School of the Arts. 

The mission of the Maryland Film Festival (MdFF) is to bring films, filmmakers, and audiences together in a friendly, inclusive atmosphere that reflects the unique aspects of our community, while participating in and adding to the larger film dialogue across the country and across the world. Film for Everyone.