Anyone would’ve been excused if they walked by City High on May 15th, 2026, and thought that Comic-Con had come into town.
Walking up the hill to the Opstad Auditorium were students and parents alike, dressing in costumes ranging from monsters to fairies, to attend the annual City High Film festival, a spectacular array of horror, comedy, and cinematographic skill. There was a record amount of student films this year, and a variety of different ideas and genres.
“We take whatever is given to us, as long as it doesn’t have any problematic content,” Dan Peterson, one of the Art teachers in charge of the Film Fest, said. “It’s a true representation of the movies that our kids are making. It’s usually a combination of horror and some class projects.”
Most of the movies are live action, but a few are animated, such as Peau d’Ane, a movie directed by Esme Hutchinson-Reuss ‘26, dubbed in French and animated using stop-motion claymation. Hutchinson-Reuss participated in many other films, and starred in Ben Haines ‘27’s The Donut Hole, a movie about Candace, a girl who steals a Hamilton poster in order to buy a necklace to tell Audrey, the girl she loves, how she feels.
“I like messing with the audience a little bit. Sometimes the title is the first thing that comes to me, but this one came pretty early,” Haines, who aspires to become a writer and director in the future, said, “I wanted to make a movie about somebody who is so missing the greater point of what they’re doing. I think that the movie is about her seeing the hole rather than the donut. Because regardless of whether she and Audrey end up together, she did it and that’s the important thing. The rest is sort of arbitrary.”
While The Donut Hole was around half an hour long, most movies were short, usually topping off at five or six-minutes. In addition to ranging in length, they also ranged in quality. Still, regardless of whether the movies were Oscar-worthy or not, all of them had the audience cracking up.
“Some of the charm is how amateurish these movies are. They’re beautifully, hilariously amateurish. And we really embrace these sort of self-aware, charmingly bad movies,” Peterson said. “There’s always somebody who’s playing around with gore and trying to make some fake blood or some grisly scene of murder. There’s also really great attempts at makeup, and usually over the top goofy.”
Both Peterson and fellow art teacher Michael Close made movies when they were in high school, when the event was hosted at the Little Theater. A clip from Peterson’s high school movie even appears during the Film Fest’s introduction movie.
This film festival was already a tradition when I was in high school here. Michael also went to high school here. And we have memories of Film Fest, and participating in it as kids. It’s become a little more of an event, but mostly just because new kids come,” Peterson said. “I like to stand at the doors and welcome everybody in. And when you see people in costume, and you see parents come in– it’s just fun to see people walking up the hill towards an art event. It’s a good feeling.”
