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From May 13 to 20, student filmmakers enrolled in the MFA in Film program at Stony Brook Southampton will be shooting a series of linked webisodes on location on the East End using a modified form of the Dogme 95 “vow of chastity.”
The five filmmakers—Bentley Heyman, Emily Lau, Evan Reeves, Helen Schreiner, and Ju Young Ra—will be working on the webisodes project with: screenwriter Alec Sokolow (“Toy Story,” “Cheaper by the Dozen,” “Garfield,” “Garfield II,” “Evan Almighty,” “Daddy Day Camp” and “Money Talks”); international film production consultant Lenny Crooks, who worked with members of the original Dogme 95 movement in Denmark; and Magdalene Brandeis, Associate Director of the MFA in Film, now in its first full year following New York State approval.
Danish avant-garde directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg started Dogme 95 in 1995 with the idea of returning to "traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology." At that time, big budget Hollywood films were reigning supreme, and Mr. von Trier and Mr. Vinterberg wanted to show that budgets don't define quality.
The Dogme brotherhood took a “Vow of Chastity” made up of 10 rules that included limiting themselves to natural lighting, no added sound, and only those props that were available at their chosen location.
“All of those things might look like limitations,” Mr. Crooks maintains, “but creatively they are actually liberating.”
Mr. Crooks, who worked with student filmmakers in last year’s hands-on Dogme workshop, has been working for the past four years with Stony Brook’s Director of the new MFA in Film, Christine Vachon, on development for her Killer Films production company.
In its first year, the Dogme course attracted a range of talents, from graduate students enrolled in the Southampton Arts MFA in Film program to accomplished filmmakers who wanted to work within the Dogme structure.
Mr. Sokolow has been working with Dogme students at the Stony Brook Southampton Manhattan site and is writing one of the episodes to be filmed in East Hampton.
“I am truly excited to be invited into this year’s Dogme project at Stony Brook,” Mr. Sokolow said. “I’ve grown quite accustomed to trying to tell stories using big effects and CGI technology and countless other bells and whistles ... But storytelling in any medium still reduces to rather simple elements. Captivating and intriguing characters. Tension. Conflict. And a certain universality of emotional expectations.”
“Dogme is really just an attempt to return film storytelling to these most basic and primal elements,” he continued. “The physical world. A camera. And characters to follow. Its very essence requires a spirit of collaboration with your fellow artists and absolute trust in the power of storytelling.
“Everything that is used to tell our story must already exist in our world; even the characters, who have been pulled from previous stories we have all already told. I am having a blast telling a new story with a grown-up, live action version of Sid from ‘Toy Story.’”
A screenwriter by trade and creator of brand-defining characters, Mr. Sokolow teaches screenwriting in the MFA in Film program and is also a children’s book author, blogger and professor of creative writing. His credited work for the screen has topped $1 billion in worldwide box office receipts.
For more information about the MFA in Filmmaking degree program, visit www.stonybrook.edu/film or contact Magdalene.Brandeis@stonybrook.edu.
