Fans exit Asbury College's Hughes Auditorium following the 2009 Highbridge Film Festival. Photos by Erika Sieg | Asbury College.

Asbury College has made the Highbridge Film Festival part of its Engaging Culture Weekend, and this year, the films lived up to the overall event’s title.

People in the area who know film know Asbury’s reputation both for sending students on huge assignments such as shooting the Olympic Games and for seeing graduates go on to major film and television careers. Outside of film circles, that has been a bit of a secret, but Highbridge is making some noise, particularly through its association with the Ichthus Festival. Winners at Highbridge are shown at the Ichthus Main Stage during the June music event.

Asbury College Media Communications department heads Greg Bandy and Jeff Day honor student filmmakers Benjamin Rogers and Leiza Palpant.

The fifth annual Highbridge Festival was April 25 at Asbury’s Hughes Auditorium. We didn’t get out there because of competing events that weekend, but one of the great things about film is that all of the primary content is recorded.

One of the goals of Asbury’s media communications department heads Greg Bandy and Jeff Day is for the festival to become more competitive, to make students strive to make great movies to get into the festival.

Last year certainly set a high-water mark in terms of wow factor.

Brock Smith’s Visceral was a bold piece of filmmaking in terms of style, editing and sound, not to mention that it has an edgy story. It virtually swept the awards, including best drama. Almost matching it in cleverness was the award winner for comedy, Pencil Me In, from Austin Brooks, Ben Corwin and Jack Brannen.

Interestingly, this year’s winners weren’t quite as eye-popping, but they excelled in an area where last year’s winners came up short: storytelling.

Ben Rodgers’ Downfall is a gritty bad-cop story that shows that he’s already sharpening his skills for Law and Order-like drama. With it, he uses the framework of a few minutes in a courtroom to tell the morality tale of an officer forced to choose between ratting out a colleague or covering up a crime. It’s deftly cross-cut with footage of the murder scene to set up the moral dilemma.

Eric Henninger’s The Love Doctor features the director as a guy who freely dispenses romantic advice to friends but has some trouble following his own direction. The film won for best comedy. Henninger perhaps should have won for festival MVP, appearing in three of the award winners: Downfall, Love Doctor and From America With Love by Lenka Kolarikova, which won for best super short.

Like Love Doctor, America had a sense of sweet whimsy.

Kendra White and Audra Buckel won best screenplay for what was the most interesting story of the bunch, about a young woman recalling her grandfather teaching her to tie her shoes. She is packing up his belongings, apparently after he has passed away.

The commonality of all these filmmakers was that there were messages, but they were not so overt that they got in the way of the stories.

That was the main shortcoming of Zach Meiners’ One Night Out, which won for best special effects. It was well cut, with its major effect being a slowed-down bullet. If anyone demonstrated an eye for current, edgy filmmaking technique, it was Meiners.

The script, about the tragic outcome of a night of drinking and playing with guns, had an overtly preachy tone that probably would turn off the very people it was trying to reach.

But again, the filmmaking was strong, and that is a key to engaging culture: producing work that can go toe to toe with what is already in the marketplace. If you can bring new ideas, all the better. This year’s Highbridge Film Festival showed off a promising group of filmmakers with a lot of ideas.