UT faculty film accepted to prominent international film festival

August 28, 2015 | Arts, News, UToday, — Communication and the Arts
By Angela Riddel



Holly Hey, a filmmaker and faculty member of The University of Toledo Department of Theatre and Film, will screen one of her films in the internationally recognized Aesthetica Short Film Festival in November.

The Aesthetica Film Festival, accredited by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, is a celebration of independent film and an outlet for championing and supporting short filmmaking. The festival includes a selection of films from around the world in genres including advertising, artists’ film, music video, drama and documentary.

These stills are from Holly Hey’s film, “the dum dum capitol of the world,” which will be shown at the Aesthetica Short Film Festival in November.

These stills are from Holly Hey’s film, “the dum dum capitol of the world,” which will be shown at the Aesthetica Short Film Festival in November.

Hey’s film, “the dum dum capitol of the world,” emerged successfully after two competitive rounds of selection review.

The UT associate professor of film said the first-person experimental documentary is a moving-image meditation that contemplates landscape, home, recollection, queerness and time.

“The project uses personal history to reflect on universal themes about home, life, love, parenting, memory and death,” she said.

Hey began the project in 2005 when she received funding from the LEF Moving Image Foundation. She later received funding from The University of Toledo in 2012 and completed the film in 2014.

To date, “the dum dum capitol of the world” has screened at several festivals, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival; the Athens Film Festival in Athens, Ohio; the Queens World Film Festival in New York; and the Moon Rise Film Festival in British Columbia.

Hey is head of the UT Film Program. She holds a master of fine arts degree in filmmaking from the Art Institute of Chicago.

She makes a broad range of work that can be seen in galleries, film festivals, live performances and on television. Her works have screened both nationally and internationally, and the National Educational Telecommunications Association distributed her last major release, “Rat Stories,” which aired on PBS affiliates in the United States, British Columbia and Puerto Rico.

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