Klara Ingersoll wins 3rd at Salem’s Five-Minute Student Doc Contest with her experimental short Hot Sand Dance.
On March 5, 2016, the Salem Film Festival hosted their 7th annual program featuring the 10 best short films by young filmmakers in Massachusetts. Festival organizer Paul Van Ness
prefaced the screening to explain that this year they broke with tradition and showed 13. “We
could have had a program of 50 films, the submissions were so good.” What followed was a
program of great depth and variety showing just how broad youth voices are in Massachusetts
and the growing reach of media making programs all over the state.
Films tackled gender identity, the upsetting aftermath of a concussion, increasing pressure to
cheat in school, Black Lives Matter and much more. Klara’s film distinguished itself by being the
only film that told a story without dialogue. It came out of a project in the Media Art Studio
Experimental Film and Visualizing Science class. Tasked with creating a piece that evoked one
aspect of the glass blowing process observed at the MIT Glass Lab and NoCa Glass school,
Klara found that she kept thinking about the repetition of movement in the glass studios.
Klara edited her piece using “Coast” a piece of music from her friend Emily Reo’s band. The
piece examines the efficient way in which glass artists interact with heated glass and each other
in order to stay safe. Glass blowers working in pairs carefully molded and moved molten glass
from furnace to work bench and back again, until the final touches were applied.
Supported by instructor Angélica Brisk and special guest instructor, Beverly Mire, Klara and her
classmates created 7 films about the art and science of glass. This project was made in
collaboration with MIT Glass Lab, NoCa Glass School and a grant from Cambridge Arts Council.
Watch Hot Sand Dance >>
This year, Experimental Film and Visualizing Science classes will be exploring MIT’s robotics labs.
To see the latest work from students at The Media Arts Studio, check out
CEATV’s Media Portal.