By Eojin Choi

Filmmaker Michael Morgenstern ’03  will teach the eight classes of Video Art for five days this week. On Monday, he screened his short film, “Shabbat Dinner”, during break.

His 14-minute long film, which took him several months to write, film, and edit, tells the story of two kids and their coming out processes during a Friday night dinner in New York and the conflicts they face with their families. Since the film’s completion, Morgenstern has submitted it to various film festivals including the Hong Kong International Film Festival, which will screen it later this month.

Morgenstern’s interest and passion in filmmaking began when he used his parents’ cameras and started teaching himself as a 10-year-old. While he attended Harvard-Westlake, he took video art classes and made a 20-minute film about searching for the stolen Wolverine, which was shown at the end-of-the-year assembly of his freshman year. Although he did not take any film-related classes at the boarding school in Montana he attended from his second semester of junior year, he studied film at the Rhode Island School of Design while he was a student at Brown University. During his college years, Morgenstern created a 46-minute long documentary about three students running for student council president.

He spent a year in Africa with FilmAid, teaching filmmaking in refugee camps.          

“I love directing,” Morgenstern said. “I love turning a story into a visual.”