Huntington News

Issue date: 10/6/08 Section: The Inside

Media Credit: Zach Virgilio Harvard Square was packed with hundreds of cinema lovers Saturday, shown above, who were attending the first annual One-Minute Film Festival, Le: 60.

A person can accomplish a lot in a minute. Although society-at-large might consider the time to be fleeting, the founders of Lumen Eclipse, an art gallery in Harvard Square that focuses entirely on the art of film, have a different point of view.

The gallery put on its first annual One-Minute Film Festival, named Le: 60, that screened on Palmer Street in Cambridge Saturday. Although originally scheduled for Sept. 27, the first attempt was canceled due to weather conditions.

While Lumen Eclipse has existed for about two and a half years, the gallery had only shown eight films a month until the festival. Each month featured a different artist or theme, on outdoor screens in Harvard Square.

Jennifer Lucey-Brzoza, one of the founders of Lumen Eclipse, said that introducing the free One-Minute Film Festival "was a way to be more inclusive … to show [pieces] from beginner filmmakers, as well as more professional filmmakers."

For the event, Lucey-Brzoza said Lumen Eclipse received about 200 submissions and picked 100 to show at the festival.

She said submissions came from 15 states and 19 countries, and represented almost every genre of film, from the trippy surrealism of "One" by Ben Shalom, to the slapstick comedy of "Piano Concert" by Paul Ezzy, to somber reflections on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of "Hot Summer in Beirut" by Sharif Abdullah.

Despite the assumed difficulty of stuffing a full plot into one minute, Ezzy said he had no difficulty with the caveat - but said that short comedy films are his specialty. He said this kind of work inspires a certain kind of creativity.

"You can't rely as much on words or complicated plots," Ezzy said.

Lucey-Brzoza said putting time restrictions on a project can encourage ingenuity.

"It breaks you out of your comfort zone," she said.

Some Northeastern students, however, like middler history major Chris Padovano, said they didn't think someone could fully capture an idea in one minute.

"The idea is to make the audience understand," Padovano said. "I wouldn't understand it in one minute, personally."

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