Pillars, a short film written and directed by alumnus Cameron Bruce Nelson '20 and produced by alumna Chloe Sarbib '20, continues its successful festival run. The coming of age drama recently screened at the Montclair Film Festival and took home the award for Outstanding US Narrative Short at the all-online DC Shorts International Film Festival.
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 the Maryland Film Festival and Slamdance 2020.
Cameron Bruce Nelson is a writer and 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.
Chloe Sarbib is a French-American writer, director, and editor based in Brooklyn. Her films have played and won awards at festivals in the US and internationally, including Palm Springs International ShortFest, Seattle International Film Festival, Mill Valley Film Festival, Provincetown Film Festival, NewFest, Brooklyn Film Festival and the Bushwick Film Festival. Her short Girl Friend won Best Student Short at Provincetown Film Festival and Best New York Short at NewFest, and her work appeared in Filmmaker Magazine’s 50 Most Anticipated American Films of 2018. She has been supported by the Janowsky Screenwriting Fellowship, the Indian Paintbrush Production Grant, and the Catwalk Institute.
