Student Filmmakers’ Work Shines At ​“BestFest”

Sitting in front of a white wall covered in band names, bumper stickers, and other vibrant logos and designs, each employee at Darkside Tattoo looked into Rae O’Hara’s camera with a smile and reflected on the art of tattooing.

Carlos Lopez became a tattoo artist when he realized that he didn’t want to be in the streets or go to jail anymore. Dan Adamczyk paints in watercolors or sculpts in clay when he gets tired of making drawing after drawing after drawing. Mikey Har made his first tattoo while stationed at an army barracks in Germany, drawing an L on his buddy’s left foot and an R on top of his right.

These candid and intimate interviews make up O’Hara’s five-minute documentary ​“Darkside Tattoo: The Inside Story,” which played at Best Video Film and Cultural Center on Whitney Avenue Saturday afternoon as part of the first annual BestFest Student Film Festival.

O’Hara, an 18-year-old senior at East Haven High School, whose parents run Darkside Tattoo, was one of six student filmmakers to participate in this year’s festival, which was open to high school students from New Haven, West Haven, East Haven, North Haven, Woodbridge, Hamden, and Orange.

The festival was the culmination of one of Best Video’s first major initiatives to realize its educational mission since officially becoming a not-for-profit, a transformation that formalized the 32-year-old video store-café-performance venue’s dedication to fostering a love of watching, making, learning from, and bonding over movies in the greater New Haven film community.

Around 25 students, teachers, and supportive family members filled Best Video’s performance space from 4:00 to 5:30pm on Saturday afternoon to watch the student submissions, which ranged from documentaries to narratives to experimental shorts, and came from students at East Haven High School, Metropolitan Academy, Wilbur Cross High School, and the Educational Center for the Arts.

All of the short films, including O’Hara’s, exhibited what local filmmaker Brendan Toller described in his introductory remarks as the ​“drive and creativity” necessary for students interested in realizing their creative ambitions through moving pictures.

“It’s a really exciting time for you guys because you all have this cheap, accessible digital technology available to you, especially at your schools,” said the 30-year-old director of Danny Says and I Need that Record, reflecting on how he started making movies right at the time when filmmakers could start editing their work on computers.

“People are always interested in really good stories, whether it’s documentary or narrative film, and you all should be really proud that you’ve made and are going to be screening your movies in front of other students here at such a great local film resource as Best Video. That’s a big step.”

Although Best Video hosted several filmmaking workshops over the past few months in which local experts offered guidance on everything from pre-production to sound recording to editing for students interested in participating in BestFest, most of the submissions that played on Saturday afternoon were made during the school year to satisfy various class projects and homework assignments.

Vincent Coker, 16, presented ​“Special Delivery,” a short narrative film that follows a young man who is transported back to mid-century East Rock through the time-warping powers of a mysterious watch. Coker had made the film as his final project for a filmmaking class at East Haven High School.

Caden Rodems-Boyd, 17, who already has one feature film under his belt, premiered a short, acerbic comedy about his own ambivalence toward filmmaking, which was made at ECA in response to a homework assignment that called for a story about an important day in his life, presented in a non-linear format.

But regardless of the movies’ origins, they all represented the young directors’ desires to put their nascent filmmaking talents to work in telling stories about themselves and their communities, and to share those stories with an audience outside of the classroom.

O’Hara’s ​“Darkside Tattoo” exemplified that impulse, employing a montage of interviews buoyed by a gentle, acoustic guitar melody to shine a light on an eclectic group of artists, with bushy beards, multiple piercings, and intricate neck tattoos, who had found their way to a profession that adamantly encouraged their visual creativity.

“These artists at Darkside Tattoo are my parents’ best friends. I grew up with them, and I love them,” O’Hara said as the short festival wrapped up. ​“I thought, how could I show my appreciation for them and still get a good grade for my film class? So I decided to make a documentary about my favorite people.”

Thanks to BestFest, the audience that gathered at Best Video on Saturday afternoon got to see and hear the stories of those creative individuals, and also get a sneak peek into the next generation of New Haven-area filmmakers.