American College of Arts and Performing Arts

EASTBRIDGE, Vt. — Students from the American College of Arts and Performing Arts (ACAPA) Film & Media Arts department returned from Burlington last week with three awards from the 18th Annual Northeast Student Film Festival, held March 1 and 2 at the Merrill Arts Center. MFA candidate Priya Nair took top honors in the Documentary Short category for her film The Granite People, while a trio of BFA students swept all three prizes in the Experimental Film category, marking the first time in the festival's history that a single institution has claimed an entire category.

The Northeast Student Film Festival, one of the region's most competitive collegiate film showcases, drew 214 entries from 38 colleges and universities across Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and Pennsylvania. Films are judged by a rotating jury of independent filmmakers, film educators, and industry professionals. This year's jury included documentary director Cecile Brant, experimental filmmaker and Bard College faculty member Jerome Kwaku, and veteran film editor Dana Ostrowski of Burlington-based production company Meridian Films.

Best Documentary Short: The Granite People

Priya Nair, a second-year MFA candidate from Chennai, India, won the festival's top documentary prize for The Granite People, a 22-minute film documenting the lives of three aging stonecutters in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom who have worked the same quarry for a combined 110 years. Nair filmed over the course of two semesters, conducting more than 40 hours of interviews and capturing the community's response to the planned closure of the Hartswell Quarry in Barton.

"I wanted to tell a story about labor and memory and landscape all at once. These men carry the mountain in their hands — they know every seam of it. I was afraid to do anything but get out of the way and let them speak."
— Priya Nair, MFA Candidate, Film & Media Arts

Jury citation for the award described The Granite People as "a formally disciplined and emotionally generous portrait that earns its intimacy." The jury noted Nair's camera work — she served as her own cinematographer — for its restraint and compositional rigor, and praised her editing, which preserves long silences to striking effect. The film was shot on a combination of 16mm and digital video, lending it a textural contrast that several jurors cited in their written comments.

Nair's thesis advisor, Associate Professor of Documentary Film Marcus Teller, said he was not surprised by the recognition. "Priya came to this project with an archivist's instinct and a poet's ear. From the first cut she showed me, I knew The Granite People was something exceptional," he said.

The film is Nair's second year project at ACAPA. She completed her undergraduate degree in journalism at the University of Hyderabad before enrolling in ACAPA's MFA in Documentary Film in fall 2023. She has previously screened work at the Montpelier Independent Film Series and the South Asian Film Collective's annual showcase in New York. The Granite People has been submitted to several additional festivals and is currently under consideration at two regional documentary competitions.

Experimental Film Category Sweep: Three ACAPA BFA Students Claim All Prizes

In an outcome that drew considerable attention at the festival's closing ceremony, ACAPA's BFA students took gold, silver, and bronze in the Experimental Film category. The three winning films were distinct in style and subject matter, but each reflected the department's emphasis on formal investigation and material process.

Gold medalist Tomás Engel-Rivera, who grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Tucson, Arizona, said the hand-processing required for Slow Glass took over his apartment bathroom for most of the fall semester. "Every frame of that film went through my hands literally," he said. "That's the only way I knew how to make a film about what I was trying to say." Engel-Rivera will present Slow Glass at ACAPA's annual Spring Showcase on April 25, and the film has been accepted as an official selection at the upcoming Green Mountain Experimental Film Gathering in June.

Sable Achterberg's Inventory of an Ordinary Room began as a class assignment in ACAPA's third-year studio course, FILM 3220: Structural and Materialist Cinema, taught by visiting faculty member and filmmaker Iris Chow. "Sable took the assignment brief and made it her own completely," Chow said. "The film is quiet but it doesn't let you go." Achterberg, who is also pursuing a minor in Philosophy, said she was interested in "making the duration of looking into a subject."

Daniel Osei's After the Levee draws on archival research he conducted during ACAPA's winter study period, when he spent three weeks at the Louisiana State Archives in Baton Rouge. The film weaves together government footage, home movies, and recordings he made himself to construct what he calls "a sonic and visual argument about what gets remembered and what gets washed away." Osei is a first-generation college student from Hartford, Connecticut, who received an ACAPA Endowed Scholarship upon enrollment.

"We don't usually tell students in experimental film that they're going to win anything. We tell them to be rigorous. This year the jury happened to agree."
— Prof. Iris Chow, Visiting Faculty, Experimental Film

Background: Film & Media Arts at ACAPA

ACAPA's Film & Media Arts department was established in 1971, making it one of the older film programs at a liberal-arts conservatory in New England. The department offers a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film Production with tracks in narrative filmmaking, documentary, experimental film, and cinematography, as well as a Master of Fine Arts in Documentary Film, which admitted its inaugural cohort in 2018. Current enrollment stands at approximately 95 undergraduates and 14 graduate students.

The department operates out of Harmon Hall, a facility renovated in 2019 that includes three editing suites, a digital color correction bay, a 16mm and 8mm optical printing lab, a 72-seat screening room, and a sound recording studio. Equipment available to students includes Arri Alexa Mini cameras, a range of vintage and contemporary 16mm cameras, and a full complement of grip and lighting gear. The MFA program additionally maintains a shared fund for graduate thesis film production.

Department chair Professor Adrienne Moreaux, who joined ACAPA's faculty in 2009 after a career making documentary films in France and the United States, said the festival results reflect a culture the department has worked deliberately to build. "We push students to go further formally and further personally at the same time. When those two things align, the work is undeniable," she said.

The department regularly sends student films to regional and national competitions, including the ACAPA Student Film Prize (awarded annually at the Spring Showcase), the College Television Awards, and the Slamdance Film Festival's student program. Faculty include working filmmakers, editors, and scholars whose credits span independent narrative features, PBS documentaries, and gallery-exhibited video art.

About the Northeast Student Film Festival

The Northeast Student Film Festival was founded in 2007 by a consortium of Vermont and New Hampshire film faculty and has been held annually since, rotating among Burlington, Hanover, and Portland, Maine. The festival is organized into six competitive categories: Documentary Short, Narrative Short, Experimental Film, Animation, Screenwriting, and Cinematic Essay. All entrants must be currently enrolled students at accredited colleges or universities in the northeastern United States. This year's festival drew its largest submission pool to date.

A complete list of 2025 award winners and finalists is available on the Film & Media Arts news page. ACAPA students interested in submitting work to upcoming festivals should contact the department office in Harmon Hall 214 or email film@acapa.edu.

Media Contact: Office of Communications & Marketing, ACAPA — news@acapa.edu — (802) 555-0101