NIU student-made documentary gets rave reviews

An NIU student-produced film captured top honors at a Rockford film festival earlier this summer, continuing what's become a university tradition of excellence in documentary filmmaking.

NIU filmmakers Ryan Breen of St. Charles, Chuck Abate of Berwyn and James Kearns of Hanover Park won the Best of the Fest Award at the Rock River Alternative Film and Video Festival with their 15-minute documentary, "Our House: Life Beyond Rave Legislation." The film examines laws attempting to curtail all-night dance parties known as raves.

"Our House" won Best of the Fest by unanimous decision. The festival's judging panel, made up of industry professionals, screened 30 entries in all. "Our House" also was the unanimous choice of the judges last spring at the NIU Student Film and Video Association Festival, where the film received awards for Best Documentary, Best Editing and Best of Festival.

The students made the film in their documentary production course working under the direction of Professor Laura Vazquez of the NIU Department of Communication. All of the students were undergraduates at the time the film was produced. Breen and Abate have since graduated, although Breen continues to study at NIU as a graduate student in the communication department.

Vazquez structured the class to encourage students to explore issues that they felt strongly about. "When they came to me with the proposal, I was intrigued by the idea," Vazquez said. "I was interested in how they would approach a rather controversial issue. Ultimately, their film is about the legislation intended to deter raves. Yet, several of their interviewees express concern about weapons and young people using drugs. The documentary presented a well-balanced perspective in a visually interesting style."

"Our House" includes interviews with ravers, music promoters and security people. The videographers also included original footage shot at various raves in the Chicago area. The video explores drug use at raves, the risks that ravers encounter and legislation that the City of Chicago passed to discourage raves within city limits. Ravers discuss how complex treasure-hunt clues and directions guiding them to rave sites were designed to elude police.

"The filmmaking process seemed to come naturally to the three of us due to previous experiences and how we envisioned it in our heads," Breen said. "The more challenging issue was getting access to these underground parties where security was tight. Organizers surely frowned upon cameras taping an already illegal event. But from the beginning we knew we were doing something right in shedding light on a growing part of Chicago's youth culture."

In recent years, graduate students working under the direction of NIU Professor Jeff Chown have gained national attention with their feature-length documentaries. Those films included "Barbed Wire Pioneers: Inventing a Community," which won second place in the biography division of the Silver State Documentary Festival in Las Vegas, and "John Peter Altgeld: The Eagle Remembered," which won first place at Silver State in 2000.

"NIU has earned a top-notch reputation in documentary film-making," Chown said. "With our past success, we've been getting better funding for more professional equipment, which makes our work much more competitive at festivals. It's exciting that we are entering a new phase where we are seeing success at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. We can be one of the premier programs in the Midwest."

The NIU Department of Communication will hold its Inaugural Student Documentary Festival, "Reality Bytes," in March of 2003. The festival will be co-sponsored by the Midwest Conference on Film, Language and Literature. The showing of "Our House" will be a featured event at the festival.

"We are all really excited to take part in NIU's festival," Breen said. "We're proud that our first effort at filmmaking has been so well-received."