Winner of the “Best in The Hudson Valley Award” from Hudson Valley Magazine, the eighth annual Reel Teens Festival will be held the weekend of June 6 through June 8 at the Catskill Mountain Foundation (map)’s Movie Theater in the Doctorow Center for the Arts, located on Route 23A in the Village of Hunter. The festival celebrates the creative intelligence of young people by screening award-winning films and videos made by teenagers from across the United States and around the world. Screenings will be held each evening at 7:30 pm. Each screening will be different.

The three screenings will feature the winners and runners-up from over 600 entries received for the festival competition. They are from 30 seconds to 30 minutes in length. Awards are given in nine categories: Fiction, Short Fiction (under 10 minutes), Documentary, Short Documentary (under 10 minutes), Animation, Claymation, Visual Arts, Music Video and PSA (Public Service Announcements). The winners will receive a cash prize, a certificate of achievement, and a gold statuette named “Felix.” In addition, the audience will be able to cast a vote for their favorite, with an audience statuette awarded at each screening.

Last year’s winning entries came from New York, Maryland, Utah, Minnesota, California, Texas, Belgium and Spain. They included fictional pieces about aliens and virtual reality, documentaries about Woody Guthrie, Hurricane Katrina and one about a deaf teen who hears for the first time. The animation category was broken into Claymation, Stop Motion and Computer Animation. As you can see from the brief descriptions of the winning entries, we are not dealing with what you might expect teens to be creating. As a festival judge I find it more difficult to pick the winners each year because of the quality of the submissions. I never expected to see inner feelings that teens usually keep to themselves and never express to adults up there on the screen expressed as deeply thought-out, intelligent, well made, creative works of art. The documentaries are topical, insightful, probing, investigative and in some cases disturbing. All of the fictional pieces are original and imaginative. Audiences members once exposed to the festival tend to return year after year. Last year some attended for all three nights! The Reel Teens Festival is not just for teens, but for adults as well. The audience is usually made up of equal numbers of both adults and teens.

Teen filmmakers who attend the festival have the opportunity to talk with the audience after their videos are screened resulting in an open question and answer forum. Last year a number of entertainment industry professionals were in attendance, making this section of the program quite enlightening.

“More and more school systems are offering filmmaking courses using video,” Festival Director Barry Kerr explains. “I am also seeing young people creating videos on their own because there are computer programs available on the Web that let you edit your work on your home PC for no cost. Freedom to be able to express yourself is turning these kids on at a younger age each year and creating a multi-media revolution. By taking a camera in hand the youth of today are able to say things through their movies that they could never verbalize. This is only the beginning of what I consider to be an entertainment industry revolution. Even Newsweek magazine has recognized this and calls these kids the ‘Spielberg Generation.’ Because of our Web site (www.reelteens.org) we are attracting films and videos from around the world.”

With the deadline for submission fast approaching, entries have come in from Bangladesh, Poland, The Netherlands, England, Ireland, Spain, Denmark, Canada and from across the United States. In all, 78 finalists will be screened over the three days of the festival.

“This is the eighth year we are holding the festival,” Kerr adds. “I have watched these kids grow into young men and women and I am proud of them. This year two of the winners from the first Reel Teens Festival have entered the entertainment world. Marly Halpern-Glaser, who won an award for comedy fiction, has been hired by Time Warner to develop comedy programming for teens, and Colin Bannon, who won the best fiction prize three times in row, has written and directed his first feature film, Love Conquers Paul, which is being edited at this time. I’m so glad that we were able to give them a safe place from which to mature. It does my heart good”.

The screenings at the festival are recommended for mature audiences only. Young children will not be admitted. Content and language have not been edited, with the filmmakers expressing themselves freely and openly. It’s an eye-opening experience getting to look inside a teen’s head by watching what they have created. As more adults see these works, we will watch the generation gap shrink and hopefully disappear.

Screenings at the festival start at 7:30 pm Friday, Saturday and Sunday, June 6 through June 8. Each screening will present different works in each of the categories. No two screenings will be the same. Admission to each screening will be free for teens and just $5 for adults. Tickets can be purchased at the theater on the evening of the festival or reserved by calling 845 246 1598. For more information, please phone Reel Teens at 845 246 1598, or e-mail reelteens@webjogger.net.