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Maya Angelina Grate and Grace Cardinal, Contributor and Editor-in-Chief

Manhattan University’s recently-announced Sixth Borough Film Festival is set to take place this April 10-12, and is currently accepting submissions. This new event is intended to bring people together to appreciate film and establish a fun and creative community. 

The film festival will take place over three days and is accepting submissions across eight categories, including Best Student Film, Best Narrative Short Film, Best Narrative Feature, Best Documentary Short, Best Documentary Feature, Best Horror, Best Music Video and Best Bronx Tale. 

Chair of the communication, sound studies and media arts department, Mark Pottinger, Ph.D., spoke with The Quadrangle about how the idea for the event came to be. 

“Michael Grabowski and Bob Cole, who is the Director of Marketing, came up with this idea of a film festival,” Pottinger said. “The whole goal is to continue to advertise the school to the larger community and to see us as a destination, not only for New York cultural events, but also for opportunities for our students to tap into what’s actually happening in the city and internationally and how New York is constantly a magnet to engage in all that.”

Senior communication student Billy Walker came up with the name for the event after being approached by Grabowski, the program director of the festival, and Cole, executive director.

“I’m not sure why or how the event came to be, or why they had the idea to do it,” Walker said. “Dr. Grabowski and Bob Cole, who is our director of marketing for Manhattan, they came to me asking if I had any ideas on what the name could be for it, because they were going back and forth. Since our student section is called the Sixth Borough, I feel like in headlines that would turn heads being like, ‘why is it called the Sixth Borough when there is no sixth borough?’ So that’s how I came up with it.”

The festival began accepting submissions on Sept. 3, with an early bird deadline set for Nov. 20 and a regular deadline set for Dec. 22. After being open for just over two weeks, the festival has already received submissions from around the world. 

“As of right now, we’ve got entries from Argentina, India, Kazakhstan,” Grabowski said. “We have an entry from France. So we’re getting a lot of global attention…There’s a big attraction to being able to screen a film in New York City.”

In addition to this being the first ever Manhattan University-sponsored film festival, the Department of Communication, Sound Studies and Media Arts has plans to offer a class in the spring semester that will allow students to be hands-on in the event’s planning and execution. 

“I’ve just gotten permission to set up a special topics course called Film Festival Management, and that’s going to run in the spring semester,” Grabowski said. “My plan for this course is to bring in some guest speakers who run festivals and talk about the process, to get students input and to have students in the class reach out to other students about about what’s going to be most useful and interesting to students, because I really want this to be something that we’re not just celebrating film, but we’re having our students come back together to celebrate this fall with us… I want the students to have a lot of involvement in planning this and so during the festival, they’ll assist in the managing and running of the festival as well.” 

Two of the categories those involved are most excited about are Bronx Tales and music videos. 

“We have a category called Bronx Tales,” Grabowski said. “This category is any films that are either about the Bronx or set in the Bronx, or that are inspired by the Bronx. We want this festival to do two things. We wanted to have an international participation, so that we’re seeing films from around the world and seeing films from different cultures and different voices.”

Walker spoke to The Quadrangle about how having unique, modern categories like that for music videos can pique student interest. 

“I would say it just automatically makes interest at a higher level,” Walker said. “With a music video, it’s so much more creative. You can’t just make a random music video for a song that’s already out and you don’t own the copyrights to it. So it allows collaboration between students here, and outside of the college or university, who are actually making music. I think you’re not just confined anymore to ‘here’s a documentary, and it’s 10 minutes long’ about this certain thing, like, how can you make it fun for yourself as well at the same time?”

The festival will give students and aspiring filmmakers a place to exhibit their work and receive feedback from a wide audience. 

“I think festivals like [this] give an opportunity for you to get feedback and guide your creativity in ways that you just aren’t able to do on your own or with friends who just give you the compliments that you’re just looking for,” Pottinger said. “You want people to challenge you. You want to see how you compare to other people, and really put yourself in that stress space where you know, ‘let’s see what I got’. I think everyone who’s in the creative industry needs that.”

Many faculty judges have already been selected to join the panel. So far, judges include Deirdre O’Leary, Ph.D., Jeff Cherubini, Ph.D., Laura Redruello, Ph.D., Evelyn Scaramella, Ph.D. and Carol Ciancutti. Also joining the judging panel is Margaret Groarke, Ph.D., who will be heading Bronx Tales judging, as well as Thom Gencarelli, Ph.D. and Mark Pottinger, Ph.D., who will be in charge of music video entries. 

As for the logistics of the festival, films submitted to the short film category will be 40 minutes or less, while feature films will be between 80 minutes and three hours long. Grabowski discussed with The Quadrangle that these particular time limits were chosen so that the festival is able to screen as many films as possible, and will allow audiences to view multiple projects in one sitting. 

“I’m planning on having about four to five slots per day of screening. So we’ll start around noon and we’ll continue through the evening,” Grabowski said. “And we have three venues booked right now. We might shrink that down to two or one venues, depending upon the time of day and the number of entries we have, but it’s really going to be determined by what the judges think are worthy of showing at the festival and how many entries we get.”

In addition to making the film festival accessible to students with both free submission and tickets for admission, the program plans to facilitate professional development opportunities as well. 

“I’m just in talks right now, but I’m talking with different community leaders in the Bronx about having presentation sessions, in addition to short film screenings about artists in the Bronx, different communities in the Bronx, that are engaging in art,” Grabowski said. “And I’m hoping that as we firm up those plans, I’ll be able to make some announcements on our Instagram page and elsewhere about those special events. So we’re working on that.”

This film festival may be in its inaugural year, but it marks the beginning of what Walker and others hope to be an annual event for years to come. 

“I hope it does become an annual event,” Walker said. “I think this is great, not only for Manhattan [University] and the Bronx, I think it’s great for the school, especially coming out of years where there really wasn’t a lot happening, and they weren’t really thinking of students first. I think this is a great event, especially for a department that has been overlooked in the last few years.”

Pottinger also expressed his hopes for the event to become a yearly tradition, adding that this is a year for mistakes and growth for the festival. 

“We’ll obviously do things wrong, and we’ll try to correct those, but the hope is to make this the start of many,” Pottinger said. “That’s the hope. And like all film festivals, they start from something, and from there, people review it, it’s in newspapers, it’s in discussions, it’s on Time Out. You start to see it in different places, and more and more people get involved, and then you get sponsors… It has to start someplace. We’re hoping that it’s least successful in this first run, and we’ll correct the things that we did wrong and improve the things that we did right and move forward. Hopefully there’s more to come.”

To stay up to date with the newest information regarding the event, follow @sixth_borough_film_festival on Instagram.