On Monday, March 22, students in professor James Morrison's Lit 130 (Language of Film) class will be treated to a visit by Brian Higdon '04, a filmmaker whose short feature The Call to the Post was recently accepted to the South by Southwest Film Festival, where it was screened on three different afternoons this month.
Higdon directed the film, just shy of 10 minutes, about a character named David (actor Peter Friedman) who visits a racetrack where he once worked. A few things about the place have changed and, after sneaking in, David finds himself on a "journey to reconnect with the job that once defined him."
A writer for the Huffington Post, who saw the film Kentucky Derby weekend (making it "particularly poignant") says it "caught the heartbreak of a trumpeter who can't let go."
Visit the film's Web site to view a trailer.
Morrison says he has stayed in touch with Higdon since he graduated from CMC, and throughout the time that Higdon was earning his master's degree in fine arts at CalArts. "I've seen most of his work to date," Morrsion says, including The Saint of the Zuiderzee, which won the 2005 Slamdance Film Festival Short Screenplay award, and was named Best Short at the Staten Island Film Festival 2006 in 2006. The CMC alumnus' body of work also includes the films A Half Life of Guilt (2002), Housekeeping (2003), and Blood Oranges (2007).
Higdon, who happens to be the nephew of James Higdon, a professor of physics in the Joint Science Department, will screen The Call to the Post, as well as some of his previous works, for students in Morrison's class on Monday. (Students from outside the class also are welcome to attend.)
"The film is a sensitive and empathetic piece about obsolescence and middle age, a topic treated with a wisdom that belies Brian's youth," Morrison says, "and in which every shot is fully composed and interestingly inflected.
"I'm hoping he'll discuss his creative process in producing this work, as well as some of the more nuts-and-bolts aspects of filmmaking and graduate study in film," Morrison added.
According to his bio, Higdon's parents first allowed him to play with the family camcorder when he turned 8. His steadily increasing skill finally earned him the honor of videotaping gift-openings on Christmas morning 1997. Born in Tarrytown, New York, he was raised in central Virginia and suburban Boston.
Higdon graduated cum laude from Claremont McKenna College with a bachelor's degree in psychology and film studies, and is a 2009 graduate of the CalArts MFA Film Directing Program.