153 Films, Eight Days, One Passion - Bowdoin News

whff poster 30th — This year's event showcases more than 150 films chosen from around 1,000 submissions. Image drawn by animator Patrick Smith.

“We chose this year’s films from nearly a thousand submissions from around the world. There are fifty-two feature-length narrative and documentary films and more than 100 drama, comedy, animated, and documentary shorts,” said Laster. “We try to provide opportunities for emerging filmmakers to have their work seen before audiences, and for audiences to see films they wouldn’t typically get to enjoy in a festival setting with many of the filmmakers in attendance.”

Running the festival is a full-time job for Laster these days (“more than a full time job,” she says), but her career path began at law school, followed by years of work in the public policy and legislative arena. Films and filmmaking, however, have always been a passion for Laster, who majored in government and legal studies at Bowdoin. “I enjoyed taking a film class with Barbara Kaster and learning how to make a movie,” she said, “but there were very few job opportunities in the indie film industry in those days and the festival circuit was tiny.”

She and a friend started the Woods Hole Film Festival in 1991, partly, said Laster, to provide a venue for a short movie she had made. “We had this lofty goal, which was partly tongue-in-cheek, of setting up an East Coast version of the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, which started some years earlier. We showed five short films to a packed house and it grew from there.” As it turned out, Laster’s legal background proved useful in her second career. “The world of independent filmmaking has grown considerably, and there’s a significant connection between films, particularly documentaries, and public policy.”

The Woods Hole Film Festival is a case in point, with much of the programming centered around environmental themes. “About five years ago we launched a film and science initiative to bring together filmmakers and scientists to make better films about science,” said Laster. It made sense, she explained, given the festival’s location at Woods Hole in Cape Cod, Massachusetts—home of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center and the nation’s oldest marine laboratory, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Marine Biological Laboratory. “The proximity of the science labs presents the opportunity to include films with an environmental theme and draw on local expertise for film-related discussions.” This year, she said, the festival is premiering its first two productions under this initiative. “We commissioned the filmmakers, funded them, and helped produce the documentaries. One of the films is called Bruce + Alvin, about the oldest manned submersible–the one that located the Titanic years ago. The other production, Wildfire, is the first episode of the ten-part series Our Future Our Fight, that tells stories of youth climate activists and scientists working on those issues.”

“We chose this year’s films from nearly a thousand submissions from around the world. There are fifty-two feature-length narrative and documentary films and more than 100 drama, comedy, animated, and documentary shorts”

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