In conjunction with BAMPFA’s virtual Student Committee Film Festival, watch a live conversation and Q&A with BAMPFA Student Committee members Collette Keating and Amaris L’Heureux and student filmmakers.

Collette Keating is the film chair for the BAMPFA Student Committee and a third-year film and art history major at Cal. She misses Student Committee meetings, live concerts, and—especially—the pistachio cake from Babette.

Amaris L’Heureux is a second-year film and English major at UC Berkeley, as well as marketing chair of the BAMPFA Student Committee. She’s passionate about art and writing, and also hoping to see some movies on the big screen in the near future.

An MFA candidate in cinema at SFSU, Sepideh Khosrowjah (Lemon Cake) is an Iranian-American playwright, theater director, filmmaker, and cofounder of the Berkeley-based Iranian-American theater group Darvag. Her plays have been performed in the US, Europe, and Iran and selected for the 2013 Fajr International Theatre Festival.

Birdy Wei-ting Hung (Dear Commuter) is an MFA candidate in cinema at SFSU and recipient of the 2020 Bill Nichols Scholarship. Her research interests include body genres and affect theory. She was recently published in Cinemedia. This latest project was selected for the 23rd San Francisco Independent Film Festival.

A film major at California College of the Arts, Canadian filmmaker Amber Fenton (Gesundheit) began writing, filming, and producing short films and music videos at a very young age. Comedy and fiction have been her main focuses, especially finding ways to alter reality or make the banal extraordinary. Recently, this includes playing with the angles and rhythms of visual storytelling.

Duy Duc Le (Beyond the Storm) is a nineteen-year-old filmmaker from Vietnam who attended SFSU for three semesters, during one of which Le only took cinema-related classes. Though the COVID-19 pandemic has forced Le to return to Vietnam, he plans on transferring as soon as it’s safe to get back to the US.

Twenty-two-year-old Ash Verwiel (heart whispers) was born in a small town in the Netherlands and has been attending SFSU since moving to San Francisco in 2017. Ash cares about treating others with kindness, equity, honoring our ever-giving planet, spirituality, and shifting perceptions in people to reshape frameworks created by the mind.

Imran Sekalala and Judah Ray Marsden (The Lung). Sekalala is from Kampala, Uganda. He is a junior studying data science with a minor in environmental design. He is passionate about photography. Marsden grew up in Madrid, Spain. He enjoys remixing the visual world through new techniques in animation and editing. He is majoring in conservation and resource studies, specializing in environmental justice.

Molly Forster and Nick Roberts (The Drying Salton Sea). Forster is an Emmy Award–winning investigative reporter and video producer based in Southern California who graduated from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Roberts is a journalist and video producer based in the Bay Area whose work has been published by the New York Times, PBS Frontline, CalMatters, and Oregon Public Broadcasting. He holds a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Gavin Richard (9/9/2020, Oakland) works as a videographer around the Bay Area, while attending UC Berkeley as a film and English major. Being a drone operator for video productions has presented him with many opportunities.

First year MFA student at SFSU Diana Ojeda (Pantaleón) is a war documentary filmmaker from Colombia. Dabbling in the world of fictional film through this shorter work, she puts her thoughts on the nature of war into Pantaleón's main character.

Marcela Vargas and Erik Nuding (Telepatía). Vargas is an anthropology student at UC Berkeley curious about how beings relate to time, the built environment, and their shadows. Nuding is a mutimedia artist and filmmaker. As a senior at UC Berkeley, he is writing his thesis on the metaphorical modeling collectively created during COVID-19.

Allison N. Lopez (Big House) is a twenty-two-year-old fifth-year, Queer, Latinx cinema student living in the Sunset in San Francisco and currently attending SFSU. Lopez’s experience and passion lie within experimental avant-garde filmmaking of the spiritual form. 

Christopher Thach (I’ll Be Here) is a twenty-year-old student filmmaker attending Las Positas Community College, currently applying for transfer to film school. As a young Vietnamese filmmaker, Thach is drawn to collective experiences and stories that leave people feeling a sense of life and perspective.

A recent graduate of California College of the Arts, Taiwanese independent filmmaker Huan Cheng, aka Anny (Danny, Danny) uses media to investigate the umbrella of trauma work. Spanning fiction and nonfiction, digital and celluloid, her works incorporate 2D animation “stream of consciousness” to portray a character’s internality. A multimedia visual designer, she freelances in video production, pitch deck designing, logo branding, and illustrations.

Jess Alvarenga and Brandon Yadegari Moreno (House of Little Wings). Alvarenga is an investigative reporter and documentary filmmaker who uses filmmaking to document and reimagine immigrant narratives, particularly the Central American Diaspora. In 2017, she was awarded an Individual Artist Grant from the Houston Arts Alliance. She has a master's degree in journalism from UC Berkeley. Yadegari Moreno is a documentary film producer and cinematographer focusing on displacement, migration, queerness, and land use in the American West and Latin America. He is a fellow at High Country News with a master’s degree in video journalism from UC Berkeley.