Film holds an everlasting power to immerse people in a moment, bridging worlds and expanding minds. “It’s pushed me to just see the world in a more beautiful way,” Anika Brenner, a Berkeley High School junior in IB Film Year 1, said. Brenner enjoys a variety of film movements, genres, and styles, with a particular emphasis on arthouse film. “I think it’s really important because it can shift anyone’s focus to a specific moment in time and place, and like anyone’s life or any aspect of the world that you can learn more about, and fully immerse yourself in and experience,” Brenner said.
IB Film and Advanced Studio Editing are both offered as electives at BHS, so students in these classes are often particularly enthusiastic about film. The film curricula often have open-ended projects, giving students more room to take creative liberties. “You have some really loose prompts, and you can develop it to your liking,” Elijah Suring, a BHS senior in IB Film Year 2 said. The students are granted a lot of agency with their projects. “In this class, everyone really likes movies a lot, and so can talk about movies. And then there’s so much creative freedom in the projects that we do,” Nico Lee, a BHS sophomore in Advanced Studio Editing, said.
Students gather their inspiration from a variety of areas. “I’d say my inspiration comes mostly from books that I’ve read. So it could be, you know, philosophical books, or it could just be stories that I’ve read. My most recent one, came a lot from a lot of Cthulhu books that I’ve read from,” Suring said. Lee pulls inspiration from other films he has watched, particularly when he wants to try something new. “I watched this movie called ‘Aftersun,’ and there’s this strobe light sequence, rave thing at the end. I thought that was really cool,” Lee said. Andrei Tarkovsky is one of Brenner’s main stylistic inspirations, along with silent film and New Wave films that she loves. “Tarkovsky’s cinematography is probably the one that’s most stayed with me, that I’m constantly thinking like, ‘how would Tarkovsky shoot this?’ when I’m shooting,” Brenner said.
In addition to varying inspiration sources, students often take different processes when making their films. “I get assigned a project that’s very open-ended, and then I use books that I’ve read as sort of a starting point,” Suring said. He emphasized the process of coming up with an idea, building off of topics he is interested in. “I think in all mediums, the most important part is coming up with a good idea, and with that, you just need to spend a ton of time working on it,” Suring said.
Lee got started with filmmaking by making and sending short videos, game shows, and music videos to his family during the COVID-19 pandemic. He emphasized the experimental and adaptable nature of the filmmaking process. “What happened to it is completely different from the script that I wrote for it,” Lee said about his most recent horror film, featured in the BHS horror film showcase.
Brenner, on the other hand, likes to emphasize strangeness and absurdism in her filmmaking style. “I like to enhance these strange qualities in the world that I see around me, and make my films kind of have an absurdist, or abstract element to them,” Brenner said. In addition to abstraction, her filmmaking often draws from lived experiences. “My goal would just be to capture stories and capture people’s lives as they are, but also with an emphasis on strangeness and the beauty in that,” she said.
Writing and film studies is another component of the film classes at BHS. “I would describe the curriculum as something that you wouldn’t expect going in, there is way more writing than I expected at all,” Suring said. A lot of filmmaking actually happens before you pick up a camera, and is focused on fleshing out the concept. Lee draws a connection between film and his English class. “It kind of connects to my English class. I think about narrative structure a little differently after learning about film,” he said.
Although Brenner had already explored film a fair amount prior to being a student in a BHS IB Film class, IB Film continues to inspire her growth. “IB Film has definitely improved all of my technical understanding of film, because we’ve gone into depth about the history of or just more technical aspects of cinematography,” she said.