Emersyn had an assignment for language arts which was to put together a 2-5 minute video on a Genocide war. Jim remembered a paper Ernie wrote about his time in the Vietnam War. Nancy scanned the document over to Emersyn and she began her project. When she finished her video, she was at 12 minutes. We cut it back to 7 minutes. Emersyn decided she would take points off her project before cutting more as they content would be compromised. The week the students were presenting their projects, Emersyn was home sick. Her teacher, Mr. Lambert, watched her video when she returned to school. He had a tear in his eye when it finished. He asked her to enter her video in the Shanghai Student Film Festival…deadline for application was tonight.

She needed to add video clips to her photo images and cut the time by 2 minutes. She sat down with Mr. Lambert to cut the time and they only shaved off a fraction of time – he was having the same problem as we did – what to cut. He allowed her video to be over the 5 minutes.

The film festival was Saturday, March 22. Emersyn left for the leadership desert trip Saturday morning and was unable to be at the event. We were settled into a quiet night at home when Mr. Lambert email me saying we should attend the award ceremony…hint, hint. He was one of the leaders of the film festival. We left Eleri home alone (the first time at night) for the ceremony. The Film Festival was held at Concordia this year. All the international schools from Pudong and Puxi attend this event. In addition, about 5 local schools join for the first time this year. There were over 200 students active in the film festival this year.

At the ceremony, the awards were divided between Elementary, Middle School and High School. The S2F2 film festival awards recognition for films from the following categories

Middle School
-Best Documentary
-Best Animation
-Best Narrative
-Best Music Video
-Best Video Art
-Best PSA
-Best Mandarin Film
-Best Beyond Shanghai (For films outside of Shanghai schools)
-Best In Show

For each category, a clip would be shown for the top three winners. After the awards were shown, the 1st place winner video would be shown in full. Emersyn won 1st place for her documentary, Soldiering in Vietnam. She tied for Best in Show – the best of all the winners in Middle School. The other winner for Best in Show was a girl from Dulwich School on her music video. Her music video was very impressive with film techniques in black and white and color.

We are very proud of her accomplishment!