The BYU Department of Theatre and Media Arts opened its 2025 Final Cut Film Festival at the SCERA Center for the Arts in Orem with a cast-and-crew screening on Sept. 30.
Nine student-made films featured on the big screen in the SCERA Center for the Arts with an audience made up of directors, producers, videographers, animators, editors, cast members, sound designers, professors and friends. After each film showed, a couple of the students involved took the stage to remark on their work and were met with enthusiastic applause from their peers.
These short films served as many students’ capstone projects. Erin Elizabeth Gibson, a recent BYU alumna, pitched her film “Connecting Flights” in April 2024.
“I was just tallying it up, and it was like 1600 hours that I've spent on this project. It's been years ... and sometimes these things get made and they just disappear,” Gibson said. “(The festival) is brilliant. It’s the only time we get to really showcase our work.”
Gibson's film was centered around a longing for connection and featured an all-Black family of eight.
“I wanted it to be an all-Black family, because my family is (Black) and that's what I know,” Gibson said. “(When) we were sitting on set and I had my family of actors, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this feels like it feels like home.’ That was something that I loved about (filming) ... I see myself in this family.”
Another featured film, the documentary "Rutas and Routes," showed the parallel stories of two families: a group of pioneers and a trio of Venezuelan refugees.
Samantha Bezzant, the film's director, was unable to attend the screening, but her producer read remarks she wrote in advance.
“This documentary wasn’t just made to entertain,” Bezzant wrote. “It was made to make us reflect, to listen and to begin conversations about stories that often go unheard.”
While some of the featured films — like the animated “Love & Gold” — were lighthearted and fun, many were designed to be thought-provoking. They depicted tough topics like mental health, loneliness, death, theft and forgiveness.
The final film of the night, “Baker’s Boy,” followed a troubled teenager who began working as an assistant for a small bakery to pay for the damages he caused attempting to rob the shop. Anna Kongaika, the short film’s editor, shared her thoughts on its message of forgiveness.
“We hope that our film and all the films here tonight inspired you to be a little more kind, because you never know what someone is going through,” Kongaika said.
Following the screening, the short films were made accessible for public screenings in the Megaplex Theaters in Geneva.