Notting Hill and Ealing High School Hosts Film Festival

Invited guests include Barbie casting director Lucy Bevan

Students from GDST schools attended the Film Festival gala where winners to the film
competition were announced

March 28, 2024

A two-day film festival was held recently at Notting Hill & Ealing High School which included a film convention and a gala awards evening.

On the first day of the festival, hundreds of local secondary school children got the opportunity to attend the convention to learn about careers in the world of film production and network with industry professionals, who ran 12 stalls, including a stunt workshop.

There was a talk from a star-studded guest panel, featuring casting director Lucy Bevan, responsible for Barbie and Cruella, producer Victoria Fea, who produced TV shows Marchella and The Durrells, and design researcher Karen Krizanovich, who worked on The Avengers and Mission Impossible.

For the first time, local schools were also invited in addition to the Girls’ School Day Trust (GDST) network and over 200 students attended in total.

This year’s film competition to GDST opened in February with the theme ‘Flip the Script: a different perspective’. Thirty-eight student short films were submitted, the highest number received for this bi-annual competition to date. The five judges – Wesley Cannon, Phil Dunn, Victoria Fea, Ashley Gething and Sigrid Goddard – reduced this to 21 shortlisted films.

The star-studded guest panel, featuring casting director Lucy Bevan, producer
Victoria Fea and design researcher Karen Krizanovich, at the Film Convention

The festival culminated the following day with a student-led gala evening in the main hall on Tuesday evening. The shortlisted films were each introduced by students from the attending schools and then watched in full before the winners were announced and won golden statues. Nearly 200 students, teachers and parents from 12 GDST schools across the country attended the gala.

The overall winners for Years 7-9 were Wimbledon High and for Years 10-13 were Newcastle High. There were also winners in each age group for different categories including creativity, cinematography, costume, acting and soundtrack.

Headmaster Matthew Shoults said, “Women are still markedly underpresented in some of the most significant roles in the film industry: as directors, producers, screenwriters and cinematographers. The Film Festival provides a direct way to encourage girls across the GDST’s 25 schools to be able address this situation, by inspiring them through hearing from women succeeding in the industry, and by making their own short films, so that they develop as film makers in their own right.”