Short Film by Thomas Barzilay Freund ’20 to Premiere at Maine Film Festival

By Rebecca Goldfine
The Caller will be shown Wednesday, July 8, at the 2020 Maine International Film Festival in Skowhegan.
The Caller screenshot
A screenshot from The Caller.

Freund's short film is seven minutes of eery, atmospheric tension, in which a young man is troubled by a familiar yet mysterious visitor.

It will be screened as part of the festival's Maine Shorts, with a showing at a Skowhegan drive-in theater at 8:45 p.m., Wednesday, July 8. The film will also be available for online viewing Thursday.

Thomas Freund
Thomas Barzilay Freund ’20.

Freund shot and edited the film last fall for the Bowdoin class Filmmaking and Born-Digital Storytelling, taught by Visiting Assistant Professor of Art and Digital and Computational Studies Erin Johnson.

"I wanted to do something that was unsettling to look at," Freund said. "I like the idea of conveying a strong emotion in a short window of time. You need to be concise with your work."

The first film Freund made for Johnson's filmmaking class, My Rifle, My Pony, and Me (inspired by a Dean Martin song), was also selected for a Maine film festival last fall hosted by the University of Maine. It came in second place.

Both films feature Freund's roommate Cirque Gammelin ’20 as the main actor.

Freund majored in economics and environmental studies and minored in cinema studies. He will start a job in the fall doing digital marketing—with a lot of photography and video—for an outdoors company based in Williamstown, Massachusetts. In a few years he hopes to pursue a graduate degree in filmmaking.