Sam Holdren is a WV filmmaker who sent me this press release about his film “Audition” showing around the country + other films he is connected to having their debuts, etc. He presently lives in South Charleston, WV, near where I live. Congrats to Sam – he has a great future.
South Charleston, WV – Life is busy for filmmaker Sam Holdren. The award-winning short comedy Audition – which was directed by West Virginia native Sam Holdren and shot partly in Charleston, West Virginia back in 2005 – was recently accepted to its 10th film festival. The short film will screen at upcoming Fargo Film Festival in Fargo, ND on March 8th (#9), and again at the Kent Film Festival in Kent, CT in late March, which marks the tenth festival screening so far.
In addition, The Paradigm Shift – a short drama written and produced by Holdren and directed by Jon Barr – recently made its film festival debut at the Show Off Your Shorts Film Festival in Hollywood, CA on February 15; and Meat – also produced by Holdren and directed by Kevin Krutz – will debut at the Boston Underground Film Festival in late March. Audition is a tragic comedy about William Ashe, a man who believes in signs. William, an aspiring actor, travels to the big city to audition for a movie and gets sidetracked by murder, mayhem, and mistaken identity. Audition and Holdren received awards last fall for Best Student Short Film and Best Regional Student Film from the Bluegrass Independent Film Festival in La Grange. KY, and an Award of Excellence from the West Virginia Filmmakers Film Festival in Sutton. Other screenings of the film so far include the Appalachian Film Festival in Huntington, WV; the Bare Bones Int. Film Festival in Muskogee, OK; the Route 66 Film Festival in Springfield, IL; the Delaware Valley Film Festival in Hatboro, PA, and the Colony Film Festival in Marietta, OH; and the Macon Film & Video Festival in Macon, GA. The Paradigm Shift, on the other hand, is a potentially-controversial drama about an activist professor who – out of frustration – assigns his class to design a plan to assassinate the President. The repercussions are immediate for everyone involved, particularly upon the professor’s teaching assistant, whose reluctance to choose a side plants the young man right in the middle. “We’re living in a time where college professors must be very careful about what they say, even in jest,” says Holdren. “Even though the university environment is supposed to be open for ideas, you have several stories nowadays of so-called ‘nutty professors’ being chastised on cable news shows for stepping over the line in their dissent.” Together with director Jon Barr, Holdren worked to explore the gray areas in such a contemporary conflict. And finally, Meat is a perverse experimental short directed by Kevin Krutz that explores double-standards by showing how political-correctness may be seeping into man’s fantasies, emasculating them. The film shows man’s acknowledgement and eventual acceptance of his own perversity in a way that you must see to believe. Holdren – who is finishing up his M.F.A. from Temple University’s prestigious Film & Media Arts program in May – is a 1997 graduate of Winfield High School, a double-graduate of West Virginia State University, and currently resides in South Charleston. More information about each film is available at www.auditionmoviesite.com or www.samholdren.com.
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