Student Voices Voting Now Open

The finalists and jurors at the 2013 Student Voices award ceremony

The finalists have been chosen and now it’s up to the viewers to select their favorite entry from the Student Voices Short Film Contest.

Watch the films and cast your vote here until Thurs., Feb. 27. The film with the highest score will win the Viewers’ Choice Award at the Student Voices Award Ceremony and discussion on March 6.

Play for Your Life, by Gregory Irwin and Syuzanna Petrosyan, focuses on music during the Holocaust and in concentration camps. There is No Other Way, by Shirin Ralan, features the testimony of Naumi Alcalay accompanied by illustrations. Love, Noemi, by Rebecca Baugh, tells the story of Hungarian survivor Noemi Ban using archival footage and other film clips.

Student Voices invites all USC graduate and undergraduate students, regardless of major, to create short films that incorporate testimony from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. The Visual History Archive contains 52,000 testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides. The testimonies were conducted in 57 countries and in 33 languages.

The films must be up to 10 minutes long and be inspired by one of this year’s themes: Preserving Humanity, Renewing Rwanda, and Risking Everything. All themes represent the coinciding 20th anniversaries of Schindler’s List in 2013 and the founding of the Shoah Foundation and the Rwanda Tutsi genocide in 2014.

USC School of Cinematic Arts faculty Michael Renov and Holly Willis, filmmakers Sam Kadi and Eric Kabera, and last year’s winner Cecilia De Jesus will judge the competition. The winner and finalists will each receive cash prizes, and the winning film will be shown at USC Shoah Foundation’s annual gala in spring 2014 and receive a certificate signed by Steven Spielberg.