A FORMER St Patrick’s College student has been selected as a finalist at this year’s Gold Coast Film Festival’s SIPFest short-film competition.
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Ben Andrews’ short film The Vault was one of 15 films selected to feature as part of the annual Surfers Paradise festival on April 12.
The University of Melbourne PhD student said he was amazed his film was selected and looked forward to hearing the judges’ comments at the festival. “It’s good to get into the Australian film industry as a student,” he said.
“You send your films off to so many festivals.”
Andrews completed The Vault, which follows the story of an elderly Spanish professor who telephones his distant son to describe a troubled memory from childhood, as part of an assessment during his masters at the Victorian College of Arts.
“Being a university course, you could creatively do as you please, but there were certain restrictions. One of those was it had to be three minutes long,” he said.
“This is quite a difficult art form. I wanted to play with what a three-minute film could do. A lot of people in the initial screening have been moved and affected by it.”
Andrews said he owed a lot of what he had learnt about film to St Patrick’s College arts teacher Peter Hutchins.
“He was the one who got me interested in film.”
The films will be judged by a live panel and winners announced following the screening of the last film on April 12.