The stars will be out for this year's U of A's 'I Dream in Widescreen' 🎥

U of A's School of Theatre, Film & Television is rolling out the red carpet and bright lights on Saturday for its 21st annual "I Dream In Widescreen" at Fox Tucson Theatre.

We're not saying that you'll see limos dropping off movie star passengers, but there will be bona fide Hollywood stars among the audience, sure to fill the historic venue.

For cinephiles, "I Dream In Widescreen," the University of Arizona's annual student film showcase, is a chance to glimpse the future of filmmaking through the lens of 11 young filmmakers. 

"To be so young and have your stuff together," said Tucson native and actor Jon Proudstar ("So Close to Perfect," "Wastelander," "Reservation Dogs"), who stars in David J. Aberle's Indigenous horror film "They Wait." "They had fun on set and everything, but they were a tightly run group of young people."

"I'm very hopeful. What I was witness to, and have been, has been generosity of spirit, acceptance, welcome, and it's just been really thrilling," said Craig T. Nelson, the star in Clinton Willis' Western "Be Still, Boone" who has starred in dozens of movies and the popular TV series "Coach" and "Parenthood."

Nelson, who attended the U of A in the late 1960s, and Proudstar, who just wrapped up filming an episode of Sterlin Harjo's new Hulu series "The Lowdown" with Ethan Hawke, will be in the audience for Saturday's screening.

"I Dream In Widescreen" will showcase 11 senior thesis films, each no longer than 10 minutes, from budding filmmakers exploring everything from family dramas and dynamics to coming of age and criminal intrigue.

There are stories of personal regrets and reinvention, dark secrets that should be kept hidden, and un-humanly human ambition.

There's also two films about birds. Well, sort of:

• In writer-director Elias Rice Bensch's "A Tale Most Fowl," a bored sheriff and his deputy set out to discover why birds have invaded their small town before the winged visitors do any more damage.
• Donovan Heaney's "Where the Birds Still Sing" has nothing to do with birds beyond its title. The film, which he wrote and directed, straddles sci-fi and horror: a phone call from a dead girlfriend leads to a battle against reality in a place that once held special meaning.  

"I Dream In Widescreen" begins at 7 p.m. Saturday, May 9, at Fox Tucson Theatre, 17 W. Congress St.; doors open at 6. Admission is $5 at the door or online at foxtucson.com.

In addition to "A Tale Most Fowl" and "Where the Birds Still Sing," the lineup includes:

• "Game Night," written and directed by Mike Choi. What happens when a college student who hates losing is trapped in an existential game room and must escape or risk never having game night with his friends again? The characters follow Choi's penchant for exploring fascinating and flawed characters and their motivations.
• "In Memory," written and directed by Sarah Astrowsky. This genre-bending film exploring familial loss is centered around a family visit during which Max suspects his grandfather has a dark secret that blurs the line between reality and illusion.
• "Rebranding Bob," written and directed by Kaitlyn Liddicoat. An out-of-touch politician hires a Gen Z intern to bring him into the 21st century's social media world, but will his old-school ego cost him his election?

Liddicoat, who traded her native Wisconsin winters for Tucson's sunny sand in 2021, has a penchant for bringing out the heart of a story through comedy and identity.

• "Synesthesia," written and directed by Geen Lee. An android thinks the key to becoming "human" is to make the perfect song, but in the end, she realizes all she needs is a new perspective to become the idealized version of herself. 

The story follows a theme for Lee, a transgender woman filmmaker and director from South Korea who grew up as part of an underrepresented community. With very few films reflecting her experience, Lee tries to tell stories that center marginalized voices.

Western film genre gets a reboot

"Be Still, Boone," written and directed by Clinton Willis. A cowboy looks back at his life on the trail and realizes he may have missed out on what matters most. 

The film stars U of A alum Craig T. Nelson, who never graduated, but fondly remembers his time as a U of A theater major in the late 1960s. 

"It really was inspirational. And my time there was with professors that were not only kind, but knowledgeable and compassionate and very forthcoming about the difficulties that I was going to experience," recalled Nelson, who went on to star in dozens of films in his 50-plus year career. "The education I received was hands on, and it was personal, and it was absolutely foundational to what I was going to get into later."

Nelson is hoping he can pay it forward for the next generation of U of A filmmakers. In addition to establishing the Craig T. Nelson and Doria Cook-Nelson Scholarship Endowment with his wife last spring, Nelson agreed to read over and offer input to a handful of students making senior thesis films last fall. He also said he might want to star in one of them. 

"I looked at them and read through them and made the decision to do this one," Nelson said about agreeing to star as the titular character in Willis' Western.

Willis's film is a reboot of the old shoot-'em-up Westerns he watched with his dad growing up in tiny Mustang, Oklahoma.

"I was kind of fascinated by all the action and shootouts and all this stuff and horse riding and jumping on trains. And as I got older, I kind of wondered: What does an older cowboy do after all of that ends? And that's kind of where this story came from," said Willis, who came to U of A after serving in the Army, including two tours of Afghanistan.

It was on the second tour in Kandahar that Willis was diagnosed with a rare cancer that led the Army to medevac him to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington, D.C., during the pandemic.

Willis, who had been stationed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, got an honorable discharge from the service and returned to Tucson with his now wife so that she could attend graduate school.

A few months later, Willis, who had done some filmmaking in high school, enrolled in the U of A School of Theatre, Film & Television. 

"I just remembered back to high school, the most happiest I've ever been was just being with other creative people and making stories," he recalled.

"Be Still, Boone" is the story of an older cowboy haunted by the years he spent on the trail instead of on the home front. His absence has driven a wedge between him and his daughter that leads him to reflect on what truly matters.

Willis and his crew, including cinematographer Rene Rivas, spent three days filming at Old Tucson Studios, which was a first for Nelson.

"I had never been to Old Tucson. I really had thought about getting a job out there, and I was offered a couple of jobs when I was going to school, but I never did," he recalled. "But just being on the set, talking to the kids, the people that were there, you know, just sharing some experience. ... It was really just great. Both my wife, Doria, and I really had a great time."

A hippie's dream in a beat-up VW

"On the Road," written and directed by Lindsey Policar. Wannabe 1970s hippie Julie James set out from her home in the Midwest for the bright lights and rock and roll dreams of San Francisco and quickly learns she may be in over her head.

Policar loves everything about the '70s, from the music  — "My favorite band of all time is Fleetwood Mac," she said — to the fashion. 

"I kind of just wanted to make a story that paid homage to how important music was to the '70s. But also I just really liked the whole pop culture from then, the fashion, the music, the style, everything," she explained. "I'm very fascinated by the hippie movement, so I kind of just wanted to put all of those together."

Her coming-of-age story finds Julie making her way West from the Midwest in a beater VW van — on loan from Vintage Voltswerks, a company in Tucson that restores vintage Volkswagens. But her plan, or lack of a plan, finds her running low on money and ideas.

"She just kind of took off and went and she's very much on her own," explained Policar, who hopes to eventually return to her native California after graduation and pursue a career in film production. "So it's kind of her figuring out how she's going to go about continuing on and if she even can, or if she's just going to abandon it and go back home."

Policar filmed around Tucson, including in Tucson's quintessential greasy spoon diner, Gus Balon's Restaurant, and at Gates Pass.

"The final shot is just a wide look at the desert highway, which was one of the first shots that I actually planned when I was writing this film," Policar said. ""I really wanted to just have a lot of that desert scenery. I feel like the whole heading West to chase your dreams is a very common trope in film, especially a lot of coming-of-age films and stuff about music and the arts industry. So I really just wanted to incorporate a whole lot of the Arizona landscape in there."

Looking for monsters leads to secret attraction

"Vein," written and directed by Ashley Courter. A wilderness adventure turns into a sibling drama when a social outcast searching for urban legends finds herself attracted to her brother's girlfriend and confronting a long-hidden secret. 

Courter crossed her fingers and prayed Mother Nature would be on her best behavior those two days at Mount Lemmon's Rose Canyon Lake last November. 

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She wasn't worried about any mountain cold front; she grew up in a military family in Alaska, where cold days tend to outnumber warm. 

But rain could turn her horror comedy into a sopping mess.

"We were right on the cusp of when it got super cold and rainy, and so it was a big stressor of whether it was going to rain or not," she recalled. "I had a contingency plan for if it rained on Friday, but not on Sunday; if it rained Friday, Saturday, all of the different combinations. I had a plan. 

Courter's interest in horror came from growing up with her brother, who was fascinated with scary movies. 

"I have memories of my brother making me stay in our basement and he would watch horror movies with me, and I was just terrified," she recalled. "I hated them. But when I started actually pursuing film, I became really fascinated with them. And I think a big part of that is that I had such a tenuous relationship with them before that it just kind of made them grip me a lot more. And the practical effects of horror filmmaking are really exciting to me, and I've just found that the conflicts that can exist within horror are a lot higher stakes."

While she's drawn to the blood and gore of modern horror, she also likes the suspense and intrigue of the genre.

Her story follows three early 20s kids who go off into the woods looking for the monsters from the urban legends they had heard growing up.

"But the story really revolves around kind of a love triangle that exists between the three of them," Courter said, especially when it becomes apparent that the sister is attracted to her brother's girlfriend.

"The real romantic chemistry really exists between the brother's girlfriend and his sister, so a lot of drama there," Courter said.

Courter plans to continue writing screenplays and would like to write comic books, an interest she developed from her comic book creator husband Ethan Parker. The pair collaborated on the "Vein" screenplay "and we had such a great time writing together ... so we, in the future, really want to write books together."

Words matter when you ask spirits for help

"They Wait," written and directed by David J. Aberle. A desperate grandfather lets his love and rage convince him that turning to an Indigenous spirits broker can bring him vengeance, but he didn't consider that his words could unleash unstoppable forces. 

Aberle's bio defines him as a Navajo filmmaker and director from Northern Arizona whose work "blends ancestral knowledge with cinematic craft to tell stories of Indigenous roots, identity and spiritual resilience."

It's the spiritual side that Aberle takes as seriously as his goal to challenge mainstream narratives about Native people while honoring sacred traditions.

He was 13 when he started learning the sacred tradition of being an Indigenous medicine person, a caretaker of the traditions that help people bridge the gap between the spiritual world and the here and now. 

"I was raised to learn about and kind of be a caretaker and utilize songs, ceremony stories to help people and in our traditional way, help the spiritual aspect of things, spirits, beings, things of like that, nature," he said, explaining how he uses traditional songs, ceremony and stories to "pretty much be that bridge and that gap to the spirit world and to help heal people like a medicine person."

That background is central to his Indigenous horror film "They Wait," which has won a number of screenwriting awards, including at the Nogales International Film Festival.

Tucson actor Jon Proudstar ("Reservation Dogs," "Wastelander") stars as Boss, an Indigenous broker who communes with the spirits. Think of him as a mob boss, someone who can make things happen, and when the grandfather asks the Boss to arrange a hit on his abusive son-in-law, "little does he know the price of what it takes to make a hit like that happen," Aberle said.

"He has to learn the power of words and how you have to be very careful when you're talking to spiritual entities, because they take things very literal and very serious," Aberle said.

Aberle had met Proudstar on campus a couple of years ago when he sat in on an interview conducted by a fellow student.

"It was amazing to hear his voice and to hear his teachings and what he had to say, and I introduced myself, shook his hand, and then just told him who I was as a filmmaker," Aberle said, adding that he thanked Proudstar for "being a changemaker and a figurehead for Indigenous representation in film."

"We ended up talking and he shared our heritage, and he told me what he wanted to do," said Proudstar, who, in addition to acting, created the comic book "Tribal Force," the first ever to feature Native American superheroes; a third issue is due out later this year.

Proudstar said he told Aberle to "keep in touch with me and let me know when you do a project."

"And sure enough, he contacted me, and he sent me the script, and I really liked it," Proudstar said. "It was horror. It's in the genre I don't have a lot of experience with and, you know, just reading that, it was neat to see from the perspective of a Native, and the way he was handling it."

Aberle said he tapped into everything he learned over his four years at the U of A, as well as "my life experiences, experiences of being a medicinal person and just overall wanting to tell a story."

"It was difficult to make it into 10 minutes, right?" he said. "But it was a fun challenge and also a testament to creativity."

Love, money and a whole lot of deception

"The Exchange Rate," written by Sarah Flowers, directed by Sean Leeman. A career criminal ditches his partner after a botched bank heist, sparking a chain of emotional, financial and romantic fallouts that force three lives to unexpectedly intersect.

Leeman was determined to make an anthology film for his senior thesis. 

So he turned to his U of A colleague Flowers to write the screenplay.

"I told her the story that I'm going for, and we just started cooking in the lab and trying to find what story matches what character," he said.

The pair cooked up a tale of three lives that intersect along the theme of deception.

"In each story, one of the characters is screwing over the other person in exchange for something," explained Leeman, a Tucson native who was first exposed to film at Ironwood Ridge High School in Oro Valley. "And everybody is trying to screw over someone or exchange something, this for that and get one thing in exchange for something else."

The film opens with Viv and her sugar daddy boyfriend Jim at the bank, which a day earlier had been robbed by Heath and Cleveland, who apparently is romantically tied to Viv.

Heath and Cleveland have a falling out over a series of miscues and blunders.

Then there's lovebirds Brooke and Thomas, deep in conversation at a diner not far from the bank on the day of the heist. Thomas is trying to convince Brooke not to leave and take a job in New York as Heath and Cleveland pass the diner from the bank.

In an anthology film, the idea is to connect the dots between unrelated stories through inventive handoffs, like the bank robbers passing in front of the diner. All the storylines have something in common; in "The Exchange Rate," it's the idea of changing one thing for another, like Viv trading in her sugar daddy for a younger sugar daddy and Brooke exchanging her life with Thomas for life in the big city.

All those connective tissues are explored in the span of 10 minutes.

"It was a very unique thing to do for a short film, and presented many challenges," Leeman admitted. "You're basically making three movies at once, but I think it all came together in the end. It bloomed into something that I'm super proud of in this film."