OCFF 2022 – Environmental & Aquatic Shorts | Delmarvalife

The 6th Annual Ocean City Film Festival, or OCFF, returns to in-person screenings at five venues throughout the resort town. The festival will showcase over 100 independent films. Over 20 of those are films by filmmakers from the Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia area. The majority of those are short films that are packaged together in blocks, according to their genre or thematic similarity. One of the most important is the collection of films that make up the Environmental & Aquatic Shorts. These are films that aren’t simply set on or near the water. These films are ones that focus on nature conservation or preservation, as well as animal protection, particularly that of marine life. Here are the list of films you’ll see:

The Trail Beyond Highland Road by Eli Copperman. Copperman is a recent graduate of the Maryland Institute of College Art (MICA) with a Bachelor’s degree in Animation. He worked for the Baltimore Rock Opera Society (BROS) as a character designer. He’s from New Jersey, which is where this film is set. It’s described as a “dramedic” short, focusing on the consequences of deforestation.

OCFF 2022 – Environmental & Aquatic Shorts — By Marlon Wallace

A Seal Story by Willow Machado, Aimee Ham, and Sabrina Crockton. Machado (they/them/their) is a Boston-based animator, currently attending Lesley University. Machado was inspired to do the film after visiting the New England Aquarium. Machado worked on this film during Lesley University’s remote semester, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Machado worked on the film with fellow classmates Ham and Crockton. The film boasts a message of humans leaving wild animals alone, no matter how cute they are, a message similar to the one that visitors of the horses and ponies on Assateague Island also face.

The Scream of the Grouper by Patricia Delso Lucas. Lucas is from Madrid but is currently based in Brussels where she works as an Audiovisual Technician for the Council of the European Union. She’s worked mainly in television control rooms. At one point, she was a projectionist at a cinema in Spain. Lucas’ film isn’t necessarily about environmentalism or conservation. Her film is set at an aquarium, but it mostly revolves around a young woman finding her voice and standing up to bullying.

Deadline Porto Santo by Gonçalo Ornelas Gomes. Gomes is a graphic designer from Portugal. He graduated from the University of Madeira. He’s also a photographer and a videographer who works mainly in the advertising industry. He’s been passionate about the ocean ever since he was a child. He’s now in fact a scuba diver. Porto Santo is a Portuguese island and Gomes takes us scuba diving to the Corveta Pereira D’Eça, a ship wreck, sunk in 2016, which now has become an artificial reef.

Contrasts by Vanessa Prigollini. Prigollini hails from Mexico. She now lives in Canada where she created her own Marine Education Program for elementary schools. She has participated in photography exhibitions in Mexico and Canada. Those exhibitions featured underwater shots, depicting ocean and marine treasures. During the pandemic, she wrote, produced and directed Contrasts, a documentary on orcas, dolphins and belugas. It’s a combination of the themes and ideas in both Free Willy (1993) and Blackfish (2013).

Beaver Boys by Jeffrey Ho, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in London, England. He’s an actor who had a small role in Netflix’s The Crown. This comedic film is his first stab at writing-directing. Ho stars as a Chinese boy-scout who encounters a suicidal Cuban teenager in a tone that feels akin to Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012). Ultimately though, the film is about littering and pollution, and what we can do to help.

My Journey Across the Ocean by Madeleine Kelly Toomey. This was Toomey’s senior project in high school. She’s from Anne Arundel County. She graduated in 2021, but from August 2015 to June 2017, she lived on a sailboat with her parents, her little brother and her dog. They sailed over 16,000 miles, all over the Mediterranean, the Atlantic Ocean, and even the Caribbean. This film is a sliver of that journey. Like Beaver Boys, her film is also about litter. Like the filmmaker of Deadline Porto Santo, Toomey is also a trained scuba diver.

Drops in the Ocean by Dongheon Shin. This film features breathtaking underwater photography of coral reefs. The reefs are part of the Raja Ampat, which are Indonesian islands, an archipelago. Raja Ampat is inside what’s known as the “coral triangle,” and it’s distinct as having one of the richest marine biodiversity in the world. Shin’s shots capture fish that look like they’re flying through air. The water is that clear, clean and beautiful. The star is the manta rays, which look like birds soaring through the sky. It’s a sight to behold.