On Auburn’s campus, events are popping up everywhere, all the time. Organizations meet, guest speakers come to share their wisdom, bands share their musical talent and so on. Amidst all of these events, sometime we tend to miss the interesting and exciting ones. One such example of this is the Jay Sanders Film Festival. Celebrating its twelfth year, this festival will be returning to Auburn this up-and-coming spring semester, April 2.

At the inception of the festival in 1996, the Auburn Film Society named the festival after the Professor Emeritus of film and media studies, Jay Sanders. Before teaching at Auburn, Sanders served in the Second World War in Marine Corps. After the war, he became a highly educated man studying at University of Tampa, University of Florida, Boston University and New York University. Sanders was truly a pioneer for the Department of Communication and Journalism at Auburn by introducing the first media courses to the college. In his 33 years of teaching, it is said that he touched the lives of an estimated 19,000 students. All of this was truly enough to name a film festival after a compassionate and influential man.

The festival itself, held at the Hotel and Conference Center at Auburn University, is not like other college film festivals in the United States. Instead of allowing only college students to enter, high school students are also allowed to submit their films. In fact, in a past festival, the winner of the competition was a 14 year-old freshmen in high school. Aside from the wide range of age, the festival also is geographically diverse. In what originally started as a local film festival in the past, today students from across America send in their films in to be critiqued and judged for the first place $1000 prize. No need to be discouraged if your film doesn’t come in first place, a prize of $600 is rewarded to second place and for third place the contestant receives $275.

As far as the festival is structured, the competition consists of essentially three rounds that are judged by a series of panelists. Two of the rounds are carried out before the festival actually starts. In the first a judge watches more than 100 films. From these hundreds of films, judges narrow down the choices drastically to 10 to 15 films. There are several judges throughout the contest, but there are also a panel of three “VIP” judges that critique the finalist films. These judges are quite notable in their fields and have much experience and wisdom to lend to choosing the winning top three films in the third round. When watching these films, judges are not just looking at movies from one genre, but a variety of genres such as abstract/experimental, animation, documentary and narratives. This is also another feature to the festival that makes it such a unique one.

If you are thinking about making a film there are certain criteria that must be met before submitting your piece motion picture. The criteria are as follows: You must submit your work by DVD-R disks only, the film must be less than two years old, the film must not be more than 15 minutes long and it should be submitted by Feb. 19. To find out more information about the Jay Sanders Film Festival, visit the festivals website, media.cla.auburn.edu/cmjn/festival/index.html.






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