Mount Si student filmmaker earns festival praise for her first film

Mount Si High School senior Isabella Richter de Medeiros is now the winner of multiple film festival awards with her short film “Cheers and Queers.”

Richter de Medeiros’ film won several awards, including “Best Student Film” from both the 2017 Top Indie Film Awards and the Canada International Film Festival. “Cheers and Queers” premiered at the North Bend Theatre in April.

Richter de Medeiros, a Mount Si senior enrolled in the Running Start program at Bellevue College, came up with the plan to create a short film as part of a Mount Si’s digital media academy program. Her film is a story about a small-town high school cheerleader who struggles with her identity when she befriends a gay classmate.

“I started writing it at the beginning of my junior year at the end of 2015, it was very loosely inspired by personal experience and I was frustrated by representations of queer women in the media,” she said. “We only see stereotypes which can lead to negative self-image and self doubt. There not being any queer women at all represented in media leads to a sense of invisibility, so I thought I should make a movie about that.”

Work on the script began in September 2015, and was followed shortly by the casting process. Medeiros asked her two closest friends, Kaitlyn Rogers and Cammie Reid, to play the lead characters. For the rest of the cast, she went to the Mount Si drama program and got them to fill in as other cast members and extras.

The film was shot primarily in Mount Si High School on weekends. Mount Si history teacher Gerald Bopp’s classroom was used as the main location, while other scenes were shot in the gym, the cafeteria, and at Richter de Medeiros’ house.

Richter de Medeiros said digital media teacher Joe Dockery was extremely helpful, providing the support and resources needed for filming. She said much of the lighting equipment and microphones were loaned to her through the digital media academy’s equipment rental program. She also used equipment borrowed from her father, who works as a filmmaker and director.

“I shot primarily on a Canon EOS 7D with a little shotgun mic on the top. A couple of scenes were shot with three different cameras at the same time, angled so they wouldn’t see each other,” she said.

“A lot of that equipment, the lights and mics were lent to me by Mr. Dockery — there is a really awesome program where you can borrow high quality equipment for free out of the digital media room. A lot of it was also my dad’s equipment.”

Once the film was shot, Richter de Medeiros spent the rest of the year editing. She used the time to practice video editing and crafted the film she wanted out of the footage.

“The hardest part was editing, that took a year. Partially because I’m a perfectionist and because I didn’t know the software,” she said. “I finally finished in January 2017. I definitely didn’t expect it to take that long.”

With a finished product, Richter de Medeiros and her father submitted the short to film festivals and were accepted to events in the U.S. and internationally.

She was a semi-finalist at the Los Angeles CineFest and the Nassau Film Festival, won “Best Student Film” at the Canada International Film Festival and won “Best Editing,” “Best Student Film,” and was nominated for “Best Director” at the Top Indie Film Awards.

Because it was her first film, Richter de Medeiros didn’t expect much to come from the entries, but after winning in multiple festivals, she was ecstatic.

“More and more people are not going into the arts because it’s not seen as a legit job or doesn’t really bring in the money. Being recognized by film festivals internationally and seeing it was possible and something I could do with my life was a very validating experience,” she said.

Richter de Medeiros organized a premiere event at the North Bend Theatre on April 9, for people to see her work. Watching the product of a year’s worth of effort on the big screen was an important experience, she said.

The audience reactions were gratifying.

She closed out premiere event by answering audience questions on stage about her film making process.

“It’s one thing to come up after and say it’s a good movie, but it’s another to laugh at the jokes,” she said. “I was really proud of my work when I saw it on the big screen and saw how people received it.”