Samohi Film Festival introduces Alfred Hitchcock theme

Alfred Hitchcock established himself as a director who had a really strong narrative and visual sense, according to film teacher Bill Wishart. For this reason, Hitchcock was the selected theme for this year’s Film Festival.“When we choose our theme, we like it to be visual because then we can use it to tie together all the things that we do, [for example] our advertisement, our flyers, etc.” Wishart said.According to film festival coordinator Ruhi Bhalla (’14), Alfred Hitchcock is one of the best film makers because of the sensational elements that he created.“[He is] one of the most historic,” Bhalla said. “He was responsible for doing so many new things visually and creatively. We thought that having a film festival would be a nice way to do an homage and to honor him.”According to Wishart, they create a couple new films that portray the essence of Hitchcock’s style and spread these throughout the festival as benchmarks.“We also do a wrap around,” Wishart said. “We create two to three new films on the theme and we share them at the beginning and at the end of the festival.”Students from all around Southern California submit films, according to Wishart. He hopes to expose students to a variety of films.“The theme for us is a celebration of film,” Wishart said. “We can get serious [or] we can get silly [but it is] a unifying principle.”According to Bhalla they wanted to do something very different from last year’s theme which was 80’s teen films.“Hitchcock’s films are so nice and visual and different,” Bhalla said. “We thought it would be a really good way to make our festival known and to really share with other people what types of [films] we like here.”