POINT OF VU Student Film Festival: Fostering Student-Driven Community
This semester’s faculty spotlight recognizes Mariah Kramer, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Cinema & Media Arts. She met with us to discuss the development of the POINT OF VU Student Film Festival (POVU) and the related Film Festival Management course, which she taught in Fall 2024. Kramer, in collaboration with Professor Jonathan Water, created POVU with the mission of building a community for emerging filmmakers in the Middle Tennessee region, and its continuing success has been made possible by Kramer’s twelve students, who took the inaugural CMA 3333 Film Festival Management course. The resulting POVU will be held February 15, 2025. We hope that for years to come, the festival will provide a stage for multidisciplinary students to showcase their work in a competitive environment while simultaneously building a network of like-minded creatives.
Please note that this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Claire Campbell (Office for Arts, Libraries & Global Engagement): To start, can you give an overview of the POINT OF VU Student Film Festival?
Mariah Kramer: The POVU festival is a grassroots effort to form stronger connections between students at Vanderbilt and other universities and colleges in the area. It’s interesting for somebody as new as I am, having just started at Vanderbilt last year, to identify this need, but festival organization is part of my background. Nashville is home to a plethora of universities and colleges. After moving here, I attended the Nashville Film Festival and saw what they were already doing for students and young filmmakers, considering ways to build upon that network. Although students from several schools were represented at Nashville Film Festival, there were fewer Vanderbilt students participating. It is a shared goal of my department to increase our students’ engagement with the regional film community. Developing a student-specific film festival came out of seeing this need.
CC: What made you consider pairing the festival with a management course?
MK: A course on festivals was something that I already had in the back of my mind. At my previous university I developed and taught a festival course which focused on helping students develop strategies for entering their films into festivals. The department also hosted a student film festival which was successfully done through a class. While I didn't teach the festival management class, I was able to see how it worked as a class and how students craved more information about both festival management and submission strategies. Connecting the festival to a course allows students to gain a foundational understanding of film festivals and their purpose before planning starts, which I do not believe an outside club or organization would provide students with as thoroughly.
CC: How have your past experiences influenced this project?
MK: I started as a filmmaker who was submitting my work to festivals. One such festival was the Cucalorus Film Festival in Wilmington, NC. At this festival, I met a group of women filmmakers there known as the Film Fatales, which has since become a national organization, but they were only inviting women who were directing feature films to a networking event that year. Women filmmakers were already niche, so just directors of feature films would be an even smaller crowd. This led me and others to create a network for women working in any area of film, which we named the Wilmington Female Filmmakers Collective. As a group, we discovered that while there were several large competitive settings where people could show their work, there were fewer small, intimate settings in the area. Naturally, we said let’s just make a film festival, thinking it would be easy.
Up Tilt Film Festival is now going on ten years. We quickly learned that running a festival cannot be a side hobby. It is a huge commitment, so after three years of overseeing the festival, we turned over the management to local businesswoman and longtime sponsor of the festival, Tricia Delp Ireland, who could manage it full time and turn it into a nonprofit organization. She was one of our original sponsors and has a business background. I was later brought back as a board member, so I still have some involvement in the festival. It has grown into something legitimate, and over the course of its growth, I saw that there was a larger audience and network invested in this organization than we had initially thought. It has been incredible to be a part of this experience.
Developing this festival happened concurrently while I was teaching at my previous university, which led me to consider student interaction and understanding of festivals. They always seemed to talk about film festivals like they were pipe dreams, mentioning Sundance as if it was the only one in existence. This led to my development of the Film Festival Strategy course, which would provide students with practical application of selecting and entering festivals.
Through all of this, I started screening for festivals, including Cucalorus and Bend International Film Festival. Now, I am a Screener for JetBlue Focus Features, which is organized through the filmmaker magazine Gotham. It’s a large nonprofit and independent film festival. Independent filmmakers that are awarded will have their short films screened on JetBlue flights. After moving here, I got involved with Nashville Film Festival as a juror. I started working on the administrative side of festivals out of my own need, but then I enjoyed them, so now I continue assisting.
CC: Regarding the class, how many students are participating this year? Are all of them CMA majors?
MK: Most of the students enrolled in the Film Festival Management course are majors or minors in the department, but we had a few who were neither. They had taken classes in our department before and were invested in the idea of this course. This year, we capped the class at twelve, but I am confident that we can open it up to fifteen next year after seeing how it works in practice.
CC: How is the course structured?
MK: I started the course by providing students with a foundational history of festivals, considering their mission and purpose. After learning about the history and purpose of festivals, students then developed and fine tuned the mission of POVU, deciding what would make their festival unique and what values they wanted to adopt. They let their mission inform all future decisions regarding programming and events. Then, we break into committees that will be the students’ working groups for the remainder of the semester. The students serve on committees that align with their interests. Each group is based on different festival departments, so they are gaining working experience in what managing a real festival looks like.
Outside of class, the committees work on their specific tasks, which they track on their task sheet. In the classroom, each committee reports their progress, for the class as a whole to be informed and make joint decisions. I have found this process to work well. The students have taken ownership of their committees and have been receptive to their classmates' opinions.
The curatorial responsibilities are shared collectively. Each person in the class, regardless of their committee, has watched all submissions. They need to review and score all so that in class we can have lengthy discussions about whether the film should be screened in the festival and why. The students enjoyed these curatorial discussions.
We spent a lot of time discussing the mission of our festival and how the programming choices needed to align with the festival. We also took into consideration the length of the films, the themes that emerge, and how the films would work if programmed in the same block together. Students gain a better understanding of what goes into curating a film block and a film festival overall. It's more than just their personal opinion about a film. They have to take the audience into consideration as well as the purpose of their festival.
CC: Please talk more about the committees and how students choose or were assigned their roles. What departments were they based on?
MK: I drew from my experience of running festivals when considering which departments could be grouped together for the student committees. Among other responsibilities, we have committees for marketing, events, hospitality, and tech. The students filled out surveys based on their interests and skill levels, and then they got placed into a committee where they would be most useful, while also being able to learn what interested them.
The most experienced students were ones who worked for festivals previously, including internships and employment with the Nashville Film Festival and River Run International Film Festival in North Carolina. Those two students brought experience that the class could rely on, but I also wanted to ensure they were placed on committees that would grow their knowledge.
CC: How was the name created and is there any importance to the date that you all selected?
MK: The name was student-driven. It was a fun and long process for them to develop and debate their suggestions. We would go back and forth, trying to not be too corny and to have some Vanderbilt relation and to be unique. We had to vote multiple times to narrow it down. At the last second, someone suggested POINT OF VU, and it just stuck. It’s a play on “point of view,” while nodding to Vanderbilt with the “VU.”
They wanted the title to be very welcoming. They wanted the festival to feel open to all students in the region rather than just Vanderbilt. “Point of view” felt like a relatable phrase from their perspective.
In picking the date for the festival, we looked for the least busy time we could find on campus. We also wanted to create something that could be an annual tradition, a fixed weekend that works for any year, which is how we decided on Presidents Day weekend. Long term, people can expect consistency in date.
CC: How have you seen different regional schools interact with the project? Which institutions have been significantly involved?
MK: We have been mindful from the beginning of how we wanted to approach engagement with other universities. One of the first things we did was ask the Belcourt to hold a mixer. We all had a prior relationship with and investment in the theater, so it would provide us a common ground for discussion.
We have identified about 19 schools in the region for this project. We considered any school that Nashville would be the biggest city for them, which led to the inclusion of students from Western Kentucky University and North Alabama. We extended invitations more north-to-south than farther east and west, which has bigger cities nearby. In the future, we can grow outward, but this year, we wanted to target the need of schools that have Nashville as their central urban area. We’ve had 50% of the schools submit to the festival, which was very exciting.
We also created the Student Ambassador Program, where students from other universities can sign up to be ambassadors of the festival, to which we share our marketing materials for them to share on their campuses. They give presentations in their classes and hang posters, while also serving as a screener for the Vanderbilt-student submissions. Our students cannot judge their own works, so it is a way to create a fairer system and get more involvement from students at our neighboring universities. A screener mission statement and guidelines were created and shared with these ambassadors. Based on their scores and ratings, Vanderbilt films were selected, similar to how my class decided upon the selection from other schools.
We have had ambassadors from Belmont, Lipscomb, MTSU, and TSU. It has been a great way to reach out to schools that maybe have students who do not feel ready to submit works but still wanted to be involved in the festival. We have received the most film submissions from Lipscomb and Belmont. A close third was MTSU, which we expected with its geographical location and the size of their programs.
Our goal was to get enough films to be able to program two solid film blocks, which is a goal we reached, having received just over 50 submissions. After the scoring was completed, we had about 3 hours of programming. We had a nice round of applause for reaching that target. This amount allowed the students to be selective about the films, considering not only quality but audience engagement in a certain way.
CC: We are talking shortly after the submission deadline; how did the first cycle of submissions go and how will reviews be handled?
MK: We have been reviewing submissions as they were received, which was made possible by offering multiple deadlines. We had an early deadline and then a regular deadline, allowing us to spread out watching the films and begin rating earlier. If you have just one deadline, you're just going to get all your submissions at the end. It’s just the nature of people.
The students watched and rated each submission based on a scoring system that we created as a class. They submit their scores in Film Freeway, the same system that we used for application submissions. Then, we will watch the films that were scored with significant discrepancy in class and discuss our rationales for the scoring. What’s great about this system is that they can form their own opinions, but then they get to come into class and defend their thoughts or shift their opinions, which happens quite often. Many of them have said that when they watch it in class, with an audience, they feel a different way than watching it alone. I have seen a lot of their opinions shift as they consider the festival environment, watching films with a larger audience rather than by themselves on their laptops.
CC: What has been the most unexpected or challenging aspect of this project?
MK: The biggest challenge was the unknown. With it being the first year, I was nervous that we would not be able to meet the big expectations that we put out at the start. I feel good about it now, since we have met our targets for submissions and lots of students have expressed genuine excitement about building this network with other regional schools.
What’s been surprising is the students had great ideas on how to reach other schools for the festival’s marketing purposes. I was not sure how much guidance I would need to provide. I thought social media would be a crutch with maybe them thinking, “Let’s just put it on social media, and our work is done,” but they have designed amazing and creative ways to reach their peers.
The students reached out to professors at other universities to ask if they could present in their class for five minutes. They gave several presentations at Lipscomb, Belmont, and MTSU, among others. We talked a lot about the importance of human connection. It is a common assumption that their generation avoids that, but that was not the case. They braved going into spaces where they did not know the faculty or students, and it has benefited the project. The classrooms they visited resulted in several student ambassadors and submissions. Connection and meeting peers are the whole mission of the festival, so it was rewarding seeing my students dive right in.
CC: It's clear how student-driven this project has been throughout the fall semester, but once the course concludes, what will their involvement look like?
MK: How we pitched it from the beginning was that CMA student workers will be guaranteed staff to help with the event and students from the course would have the option to volunteer for the festival. In the future, I think there could be space to expand coursework into the spring, but this year we just provided students with the volunteer option for the spring. One student, who has been interested in the event side of programming, has created an independent study out of it. I feel confident that the majority of my students will come back as volunteers. Most of them are juniors and seniors, so they talk about POVU as something that they are leaving as a legacy.
CC: What aspects of the festival are overseen by faculty and staff instead of handled by the students? Who from the faculty has collaborated on this project?
MK: Professor Jonathan Waters has been a huge collaborator. We collaborated on the idea from the very beginning. He has the experience of being at Vanderbilt for longer than I have, so he was helpful in showing me the needs of this specific community. He suggested that we create something with a regional focus. My festival experience and his regional knowledge combined to make a perfect collaboration for figuring out what the real need of a festival here would be. Our shared hope is that it grows into an event that is well known on campus and by the community.
Students had a limited part in the mission statement with most of that being written by Waters and myself before the class began. We wanted to start with a solid foundation of our reasons behind the festival and hoped that those would be in line with the students’ reasons. So far it has, and students have seemed receptive to the mission we started with networking with other universities.
Funding is something that has been all on the faculty and department. We tread lightly with evolving students in this first year because our funding strategy is still evolving. I am interested in building a model that allows them to be part of the process in future years. They have already expressed intrigue about that element. I think they would surprise me with their funding ideas if opened to them.
CC: What is the usual funding model for festivals like POVU?
Most festivals operate on a nonprofit model. In addition to donations and sponsorships, several run off of the submission fees. Using submission fees for operations is not my favorite because then you're depending on students paying a fee to be able to support the festival. Fees make sure people are serious about entering the festival but this can cause a barrier of entry.
Since it is the norm and our first year, we require a small fee, $5-10, from students to enter their films into the festival, but we do not plan on charging them attendance fees at the festival. I do not want to use this model as the festival gets larger, so I will have to investigate other options. Submission fees are something the festival industry as a whole needs to evaluate. With the festival that I'm on the board of, we are working towards waiving submission fees or at least returning submission fees to all filmmakers who are accepted into the festival. I am coming at this dilemma as an artist and filmmaker myself. I would like to be a part of the change, but still do not know what the other model would look like.
CC: What do you hope students will take away from the experience?
MK: In the beginning, I was hoping that they would gain real world experience and a better understanding of what festivals are like. I wanted students to be better equipped as independent artists when they graduate. Now, I am seeing that this class has offered them space to grow, contemplating who they are as people and how they interact with others. They are watching films and discussing preferences, but they are having to contextualize it for audiences that are bigger than themselves. What I hope resonates most with them is this purpose of creating something larger than themselves. They are starting to discover tailoring an audience experience, considering how art can have an impact on the community. The discussions they are having in class show that they are applying this lesson to more than just student films.
Long-term, I want there to be excitement, not unfamiliarity when someone comes into a class to present on the festival. The festival becoming a household name for students is far down the road, but we want to start building a reputation, first at Vanderbilt and then out to other campuses as well. Staying mindful of what students need and are excited by is a way to keep the festival relevant for years to come. One of the things we are currently doing in the class is building a three and five-year plan. The students feel like they are leaving their legacy, suggesting ideas that we cannot do this year but can save for the future.
CC: In conclusion, is there anything else you want to share about this project? Are there other projects that you are working on currently?
MK: The next step will be building a sense of excitement around the festival on campus. I hope that people on campus are excited and willing to attend it. The students and I have been thinking about how to fill the seats for the actual festival. We would like to invite high schools in the area because they can learn about the college communities, they might one day be a part of. It is a very outward-facing endeavor with Vanderbilt opening the door to other universities as well as the greater Nashville community. I have been very mindful in this process so that we build a strong foundation for future years.
I am in post-production on a short film that I wrote and directed this summer. I hope to use it as a proof of concept for securing funding to turn it into a feature film. I will be on a panel discussion at Up Tilt Film Festival, talking about the process of going from a short to a feature film.
Mariah Kramer (MFA – Film and Video Production, University of North Carolina Greensboro) is a senior lecturer in the Cinema & Media Arts department (College of Arts & Science). She specializes in film festivals, festival programming, documentaries, production, and independent film. Kramer is a multi-modal filmmaker with a focus on documentary filmmaking. She has received multiple awards for her work, which has been screened in festivals such as the Portland Oregon Women’s Film Festival, Cucalorus Film Festival, and the Bend Film Festival.
Make plans to attend the POINT OF VU Student Film Festival on February 15. The festival will showcase incredible student films from: MTSU, Lipscomb, WKU, Belmont, Austin Peay, Trevecca, Vanderbilt, UNA, and Columbia State. The festival is free to all.