By Julia Berkman
Bellingham’s second annual Music Film Festival is back! This festival explores music through the lens of the camera. Local and international filmmakers use their best cinematographic skills to evoke the feeling of a song, make a music video or whatever else their heart leads them to.
The films showcased this year are from all over the world. Marina Schnider’s student short entitled “Urban Audio Spectrum” was shot in Berlin. The music video for “Apparition” by Taylor Payne was shot in Australia by Angie Fleming. There are works from filmmakers in Los Angeles, Sweden and Iraq, to name a few! Most selected screenings have little to no dialogue or script; rather, they are silent films and rely on the score to tell their story.
The Bellingham Music Film Festival was started in 2016 by Kacey Morrow, an associate design professor at Western. Her films have been shown all over the country, from the Seattle International Film Festival to the Atlanta Film Festival. She started the Bellingham Music Film Festival because it combined two of her greatest loves: music and film.
Also a large part in organizing the Music Film Festival is Mikayla Nicholson, a Pickford theater volunteer and Western student. Nicholson’s short film was recently chosen to play at Pickford for their short film collaboration with local movie store Film Is Truth: 24 Times a Second. Her past films have been showcased at the Pickford multiple times, as well as at film events on campus.
All submitted films with be shown at three beloved Bellingham venues: the Make.Shift, Pickford and the Sylvia Center for the Arts. The winning films will be shown on Saturday night at the Pickford. Be sure to visit this event, or check out the winners online at bellinghammusicfilmfestival.com. You can follow the Facebook event at https://www.facebook.com/events/1310343842386943/.
Featured image: The Pickford Film Center is a great place to go for a wide variety of film experiences. Photo by Jaden Moon // AS Review