VES professor, alumni win at Sundance

Visiting Lecturer on Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) Michael Almereyda has won the Short Film Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival for his U.S. nonfiction film “Skinningrove.” The film profiles photographer and VES professor Chris Killip as he shares unpublished images chronicling time spent among the fiercely independent residents of a remote English fishing village. Two VES teaching assistants, also graduates of VES, worked on the film. Pacho Velez ’03 was cinematographer and Jenny Lim ’12 was responsible for the sound recording.

Damien Chazelle ’08 won the Short Film Jury Award in U.S. fiction for his film “Whiplash,” about an aspiring drummer who enters an elite conservatory’s top jazz orchestra. Chazelle directed his first feature, “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench,” while still an undergraduate in the VES program. That film went on to be named one of the best films of the year by the New York Times, the Village Voice, Film Comment, the Boston Globe, and other publications.