Katherine Page ’23 Illustrates Stark Cultural Parallels in Award-Winning Short Film
This summer, Bowdoin junior Katherine Page's short film Los burladores de Bowdoin won one of the top prizes at the 2022 Our New Gold Festival—a Spanish organization that celebrates films with a modern and inclusive approach to Golden Age drama.
Page, a biology major and Hispanic studies minor, created her film with the goal of drawing analogies between Tirso de Molino's play about the famous seducer Don Juan, El burlador de Sevilla, and and the culture of men's collegiate sports teams in the United States.
Page did not initially conceive or assemble the film with this festival in mind: in fact, her original film served as the final project for the course Introduction to Hispanic Studies: Poetry and Theater, which she took last semester with Margaret Boyle, associate professor of Romance languages and literatures and director of the Latin, Caribbean, and Latinx studies program.
"[Professor Boyle] did an awesome job encouraging us to do hands-on assignments for our course, and that included this very creative final project," Page said. "At the end of the semester, after we had learned a lot about many famous playwrights, we were able to choose any play that we had read and tie some aspect of it to something that we see in today's society—it was such a cool prompt."
It was Boyle who alerted Page to the festival and encouraged her to submit her work. Page jumped at the opportunity.
"I've dabbled in taking videos and editing for fun, but I've never studied film before," Page said. "I definitely was excited to use my creativity to create symbolic scenes and composition."
Since being announced one of the eight winners of this international festival, Page looks forward to continuing exploring this medium of art—as well as themes around masculinity in both classic and contemporary cultures.
"I'm super thankful that I was selected, and that you can now all watch my film," Page said in her presentation at the festival's virtual premiere in late June. "I'm really happy to be here."
Watch the virtual festival and learn more about Page's and the other winners' films here.