By Julia Ben-Asher ’14

Photos by Professor Andrew Smith and courtesy of graphicsdesignmonica.com

Lafayette’s new film and media studies major became available for the class of 2014, but award-winning filmmaker Beth Spitalny ‘01 is clearly doing all right in the film world. This past Wednesday, the Lafayette Association of Film Students (LAFS) and Hillel co-sponsored Spitalny’s return to Lafayette to screen her filmProcession.

Spitalny sat in the back of the auditorium. “I much prefer to sit in the back and watch the people watching the film,” she explained with a laugh.

The 17-minute film illuminated the dark room. Traditional Jewish music plays. The scene of an orthodox funeral rolls, and a stone-faced girl with long dark curls quickly becomes the main focus of the film, at the funeral with her Ima and Aba (Hebrew for “mom” and “dad”) and her much younger sister Liora.

The girl, Shaina, quietly escapes the funeral and slips into the waiting hearse, hiding in the back with the coffin holding her deceased boyfriend. She begs the flabbergasted driver not to drive directly to the graveyard, who begrudgingly, then sympathetically, allows the girl a few extra moments with the boy she loves before they finally arrive at the graveyard.

Even though the film caused a number of eyes in the audience to go shiny, one of the first questions in the Q&A concerned the film containing “a lot of hope, a lot of happiness,” despite its subject matter.

“I’ve gotten a lot less afraid to use humor,” Spitalny said. “I call them moments of lightness.” While she finds humor a tough element to incorporate in films like this one, it worked tastefully. Spitalny also worked with the film’s composer on a tone would allow the audience to feel the tragedy but also keep the film a “hopeful” one overall.

Shaina’s steps as she flounced sneakily into the hearse aroused chuckles, and the driver bumped rap before finding that he had a live passenger. “My sister’s not insane! She’s in love!” tiny Liora yelled at her father when he realized his older daughter was not where she should have been.

Spitalny spoke of other techniques and anecdotes that she has learned to use in the business. Some of the most important things in her experience as a director include cohesion with the people she works with, having the ability to adjust to any the film budget, and keeping the will to stand by and defend your own film and the decisions that went into it, despite the consequences.

While she has directed six short films and earned several awards and nominations, the film Procession is particularly “close to [her] heart… I lost my boyfriend, my first love, when I was a junior at Lafayette, nineteen,” she shared. “My process is that I let things marinate in my head, then start writing.”

She began writing the script about eight years after the loss. “I wanted to tell a personal story… but not my own story.” The characters developed as Spitalny “got to know them,” and they became more specific and separate from Spitalny’sown life. Among other differences, Shaina is an orthodox Jew while Spitalny is self-declared “very reform.”

The start of Spitalny’s film career can be partially accredited to studying abroad in London and discovering visual anthropology, then graduating from Lafayette with a degree in anthropology and sociology. She worked at MTV for four years then decided she wanted to “tell bigger stories and try her hand at filmmaking,” Professor of Film Andy Smith said in an introduction to the nearly full Kirby Hall auditorium. Spitalny earned her MFA at University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, writing and directing Procession as her final thesis.

Because so many of her friends in Los Angeles were also trying to make films and funding was difficult to come by,Spitalny returned to her native East Coast and collected $60,000 by ways of grants, scholarships, and “lovely family and friends” to set the movie into production. This worked out well for her, and she has  plans to continue writing and directing short films.

Lafayette Film and Media Studies department will surely remember Beth Spitalny as someone to respect and admire for many reasons “as we continue to build a culture of film,” Smith said.