Dick Wolf Cinema & Media Studies Awards 2022-23
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Zoe Goldstein | Best Research Honors Thesis | $500
Zoe Goldstein’s thesis, “Cinematic Adaptation as Cultural Translation” offers a compelling approach to cross-cultural adaptation as a critical process of cultural translation that reframes the power structures manifested in the source text and its re-interpretation. By examining three “bottom-up” adaptations (rather than top-down Hollywoodization)—Bride and Prejudice (by Gurinder Chadha, Hamlet by Grigori Kozintsev, and Ran by Akira Kurosawa—Zoe effectively demonstrates how these adaptations should be approached as cross-cultural translations that bracket the questions of fidelity or authenticity, and mobilize instead issues of intertextuality and cultural power within a specific cultural context.
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Mars Berger and Caylen David | Best Creative Honors Thesis | $250 each
Mars Berger's two-channel installation entitled “The Cinepic Poetry” is a daring, original, and brilliantly executed visual poem. An experiment in writing and visual poetry, the project powerfully recruits, but also queers, cinema of attractions and Vertovian montage to both stage and question the process of self-narrativization in the chaotic, media defined modern world. Bodily immersion and self-reflexivity, rather than being mutually exclusive, always go hand in hand in this powerful, “cinepic” work of art.
I am afraid. Very afraid of Caylen David’s senior thesis film The Lady of the Lake. He has made a horror film that is truly a capstone project, drawing on so many aspects of his life and Penn career. It is a personal exploration of a short story written by his sister. It draws on his study of horror theory by Robin Wood and others. It pays homage to classic horror films by Val Newton and and Maurice Tourneur. And it took all of Caylen’s substantial leadership skills to manage an unruly crew of actors, technicians, composers, and faculty advisors.
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Marialena Mouaikel and Sophie Nadel | Best Screenplay | $250 each
Marialena Mouaikel's Late to Assimilate.
Isn't it BEYOND time to have a front row seat to a modern Arab American family, thriving in a small town despite constant pulls to assimilate into the prevailing white, and whitebread, culture? Isn't it BEYOND time to have a Lebanese teenaged heroine, aware that her culture - and her skin color - marks her as "different" in her everyday world but also ready to jump into adolescence... and young adulthood... as humans from time immemorial have wanted to do? Answer: yes. Marialena has written the beginning of a television series that we, as a culture, can only hope to watch: one with humor and cultural joy and family struggles, with a curious, brilliant, optimistic heroine at its core. Someone snap up this series fast!
Sophie Nadel's Suicide and Snailiens.
What is better than a feature film about discovering your best friend is a secret agent assigned to the mass assault of America's biggest threat: Giant Snail Aliens trying to usurp the government? Nothing... except a feature film about a young woman navigating the emotional rollercoaster that is young adulthood, one that is especially affecting because it includes the suicide of her childhood best friend. Sophie nails the tricky tone of this story by hitting the peaks of humor and pathos, in a story that has you cheering loudly for Margo, and even, kind of, the snails.
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Erin Brennan | Best Undergraduate Essay | $500
In her beautifully-written essay "Frozen in Time: National and Personal Memory in Wong Kar-wai’s Angkor Wat" about In the Mood for Love (2000), Erin Brennan explores how Wong Kar-wai activates color as a tool through which to explore Angkor Wat as a site where historical, national, and personal memories intertwine and complicate each other. Brennan's nuanced argument illuminates the film by revealing color and time as inextricably entangled components of this work.
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The team who made “Vertov’s Leap in Time”: Zara Akhbari, Clare McCarthy, Son Nguyen, and Mahima Sangli | Best Undergraduate Creative Project | $125 each
“Vertov’s Leap in Time” is a superbly conceived and beautifully executed visual essay, which brings to contemporary context and a local, Philadelphia urban scape both Dziga’s Vertov’s thematic preoccupations and his unique approach to experimental documentary mode. Through thoughtfully and expertly edited compilations of a rich array of architectural, industrial, and interior landscapes, the film captures Philly’s energetic pulse, its beauty and its productivity, but also its material and psychological debris, its anxiety, violence, racism, and poverty. Vertov would be proud of this achievement!
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Paola Camacho and Caylen David | Best Undergraduate Service | $250 each
Paola Camacho and Caylen David managed many aspects of our CIMS office and made the work of faculty and staff in our program extremely enjoyable and gratifying. They literally revel in any challenge that is offered to them, and, no matter how chaotic and messy things get, Paola and Caylen is always a model of cheerfulness, neatness, and decorum!
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JS Wu | Best Graduate Creative Project | $500
An investigation into the racialization of Asian bodies in an often excessively white media landscape, JS Wu’s digital graphic essay “Yellow Faces,” published in The Believer, is at once deeply personal and richly informed by studies of orientalism and affect, cartoons and anime, Legos and emoji. Coming up against both stereotype and unmarked universalisms, it demonstrates the necessity, as phrased in the essay’s final frames, of “bringing these images to the surface in order to rearrange, subvert and reimagine them, where these faces cease to stick.”
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Hugo Salas | Best Graduate Service | $500
Hugo Salas helped the CIMS program through contributions in teaching and grading for CIMS classes as well as bringing his affable and elegnat attitude to collaborative film screenings and programming events.
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