Featuring works from cinema students across the nation, the Student Experimental Film Festival (SEFF) showcased experimental films sectioned into different programs on its 10th anniversary.

The festival spanned the course of two nights, showing a total of 36 films from students. Several films were created by Binghamton University students, but other submissions came from schools across the nation. The films were diverse in their content and subjects as some took on a vague narrative, while others purely focused on the aesthetics and cinematography of film.

Nick Marshall, coordinator of the festival and a senior majoring in cinema, took note of some of the more unusual techniques used.

“There was another film last night that was screened at [the Bundy Museum of History and Art] called ‘The Pit’ and they made the film through a process using some of the same contaminates that are found in a pit of water that was the focus of the film itself, so I thought that was very interesting,” Marshall said. “There were some interesting ones, it was very cool to have a 3D film, I wasn’t expecting that. It was the first 3D work that I’ve seen that wasn’t a narrative feature film, like a blockbuster film in theaters.”

Marshall said one of the more memorable films was “How to Choose a Name if Yours is Taken” by Jack Lyon, ‘19.

“I’ve seen it a few times and I think there’s more that I get from it every time I watch it,” Marshall said. “Other than that, there were some films I really loved. I liked ‘One-Off’ which was the last film of the first program tonight. I thought that was a really beautiful film.”

The festival is typically run via Cinema 300: Curating Film and Video, where students are delegated a role that is similar to being an e-board member of a club. With roughly 300 submissions, the students had to watch and narrow down the winners and categorize them to one of four programs, with two shown on each night.

The programs each put forth a separate theme as they highlighted wide-ranging subjects such as anxiety, change and freedom.

Brittaney Skavla, graphic designer for the festival and a senior double-majoring in cinema and psychology, said she has run film shows within the cinema department before, but the SEFF is a much larger event.

“We are dealing with submissions across the country and there’s so much outreach that has to be done and organization,” Skavla said. “There is a lot that can go wrong, it’s very detail-oriented — it is a lot of work honestly. It’s kind of like a job more than a class, because there is this end product that we are all working toward and we all want it to be nice and good. So it reflects on us too, how hard we have tried. Everyone has been trying hard the whole semester and I think it’s going to end up well.”