Monday, May 19, 2025
Decorated with a Hollywood-like red carpet, the high school auditorium hosted this year’s Uniondale High School Film Festival, where members of the school’s screenwriting class introduced nine documentaries made by students who saw their creations come to life on the big screen.
The April 23 event, titled “Perspectives: An Unfiltered Documentary Experience,” presented the shared themes of the students’ work: unique life stories, lived experiences and personal journeys.
The class of 24 seniors filmed the documentaries as a part of their elective screenwriting class, created and taught by Crystal Harris, an English and screenwriting teacher at the high school.
“I had just come from a couple of film festivals back in 2019, and I learned so much from those film festivals,” Harris recalled. “I really wanted to bring that information back to my school district.”
Harris’s class focuses on the core skills of screenwriting: how to put together a script using professional software, how to market and distribute it, and how to record and edit a documentary. Each one screened at the festival was roughly five minutes long, with footage taken by the students as well as their own voice-overs.
The assignment was to create a short film that told the story of a real person. “They were asked to identify someone in their life or community who had an interesting or meaningful story,” Harris said. “Once they put it all together, the results were just amazing.”
Nataly De Leon already had a passion for writing, and recently branched out into film
making. Her project focused on one of the deans of the school, Santiago Olivia, which challenged De Leon to fit her camerawork into the school day schedule.
“I actually want to be a writer when I graduate out of high school,” De Leon said. “I also had Miss Harris last year — I was really excited. I love all the assignments that she gives us, whether she has us read a script, watch a movie or rewrite a scene. It’s just overall really fun and never gets boring.”
Jenifer Hernandez focused on family for her project. “My dad is the star, and the documentary is about him and his experience with found family,” she said, referring to her father’s oldest and best friends.
“Thanks to this assignment, it really brought me closer to my family,” she continued. “I was able to talk with my dad and let him really ramble about his friends, and it didn’t really feel like an assignment, but more of something that I wanted to do.”
Jasmine Jones aspires to be a voice actor, so she took the opportunity to practice her voice-over skills.
“I always wanted to act or voice act, and I already have some experience writing scripts,” she said. “When I was in 11th grade, Miss Harris came to my English class and she said she had a screenwriting class, so I had to jump on it immediately.
“I wrote a couple of scripts in middle school, just out of pure curiosity, because I like watching TV shows and cartoons,” Jones added. “I’ve always wondered how a show or a movie was produced.”
Jones’s film was about her mother’s life in Jamaica, her journey to the United States, and her current life with her family.
The three-hour film festival began in the morning, and the curtain came down in the early afternoon. It was made possible, Harris said, by her students, who planned and staffed the event.
“It really started off as just a class project, and I didn’t know that it was going to be as big as it was,” she said. “I challenged them to share their work with the school, and that’s how this film festival came into fruition.”
As at any big-time film festival, there was much applause after the students screened their work.
Harris expressed her pride in the student’s growth over the course of the school year.
“Many of the students I had last year in my English class, and they are such great students,” she said. “I knew that, this year, I really wanted to take it to the next level because of their passion for the class.”
