The Bucknell Intercollegiate Film Festival (BIFF) will take place at the Campus Theatre in downtown Lewisburg, today, at 7 p.m. The festival will showcase several films, each made by college students in Pennsylvania. The schedule comprises ten films, each around fifteen minutes or less, making the program about 90 minutes long. There will be an additional reception after the screening for a Q&A portion, and to present awards and offer light refreshments.
The Bucknell Intercollegiate Film Festival showcases collegiate filmmakers in Pennsylvania and their short films, and its main goal remains to bring audiences together to experience emerging student work in a theatrical setting.
The festival is programmed by students in Bucknell’s Film Programming and Exhibition course, offered by the Film/Media Studies program, and currently taught by Academic Film Programmer and Lecturer, Rebecca Meyers. The major project of this course is to plan and publicize the event, and members of the class are responsible for a variety of roles: pre-screeners, programmers, publicists, event planners and more.
The Film Programming and Exhibition course itself is a great opportunity for students to become familiar with elements of the film industry and the demanding process of bringing films to audiences. The class is responsible for the logistics of the festival, generally including bringing filmmakers to Lewisburg.
Rebecca Meyers, who teaches the course and directs the Bucknell Intercollegiate Film Festival, is an Academic Film Programmer and Lecturer at Bucknell, as well as the Film Programmer for Bucknell screenings at The Campus Theatre. Rebecca’s films have been shown at the New York, London, Toronto and Oberhausen Film Festivals, among several other venues. Meyers explains, “This class was born partly to help students understand my work with the Campus Theatre…There’s a lot of responsibility, and students learn that there are so many ways into the film industry outside of being filmmakers.”
Sam Bruhin ’26, a biology student at Bucknell, is one of the seven members of the course this semester and is responsible for leading BIFF’s marketing and public relations efforts. “It’s really challenging because I put myself in the shoes of the filmmakers who submitted these films, and I want to have everybody included, so it’s really tough to make these decisions,” Bruhin explains, “they’re all bringing something really unique and showing their talent.”
Another student enrolled in the class, Iaroslava Polusmak ’28, an English – Film/Media Studies and Creative Writing student, describes what she has learned in her experience planning the festival: “The film selection process is not the easiest—watching dozens of submissions from other students, knowing that every time you are saying ‘no’ to a film it means that maybe no one will ever see it at all—so that is a lot of pressure…However, that makes every decision as precise as possible. Our team is working on selecting the best of the best submissions through our conversations in class.”
The event is free and open to the public, and those interested in supporting the hard work of the students who put the festival together, as well as films made by Pennsylvania college students, should certainly consider attending. It will certainly be entertaining and a fantastic opportunity to experience student work and creativity.
