SunDeis 2008 began in Shapiro Theater with three moviegoers-four if you count this reporter. Without any introduction, the first film debuted: a submission from Emerson College about a young lesbian who is attacked by a man she meets at a bar. The movie was well-shot, but the acting, unfortunately, was terrible, which only added to the audience's discomfort at watching an amateur attempt at such a serious subject.I didn't attend any of the rest of the day's events, and I certainly hope that the student film showings, from 10 a.m. to noon, were no indication of those events' character.

The films did increase in quality as the morning progressed. "Meditate Drink Enlightenment," a film by Benjamin Steckel '06, now of Northeastern University, showed Saturday morning, and it was my favorite of the films I saw both on Saturday and Sunday mornings. The film exemplified the expectations I'd taken to SunDeis: random visual effects, ironic humor and style. The film delightfully made no sense; ostensibly, it followed a Raoul Duke-like main character, a lamp designer for IKEA, who meditates in order to try to undo the damage done by his participation in a "corporation." In so doing, the character comes to believe he's going to be a cat in his next life, and then flashes forward to his life as this cat. The camera follows the cat while a voiceover announces the cat's thoughts.

The two films that seemed to please the audience the most were, not surprisingly, by Brandeis students. Anthony Scibelli's '09 "Untitled Anthony Scibelli Project" was the better of the two. His film followed a character named Anthony Scibelli over a few very Seinfeldian days during which he stresses about his stand-up act. By the end of the film, I was actually laughing out loud. The plot is rather like the title-unfocused-but it doesn't matter. The film is funny, to put it simply, which means it succeeded in its aims; many of the dramatic films did not.

Jeff Rosenblatt '08 and Jason Gilbert's '08 "Crack, the Books" had an excellent premise: a send-up of the stereotypical Brandeis student. It's always interesting to see what other people mean when they say "that's so Brandeis." Here, we had a pretty spot-on interpretation of the overachieving pre-med, pre-law student who complains about all his finals and caffeinates himself through sleepless nights. However, the film was a little long and elicited some unnecessarily hysterical laughter from the audience.

Other notable films included two graduate entries, "The Pose" by Allison Maria Rodriguez from Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and "Baby Let's Play House" by Sivan Gur-Arieh of Columbia College. "The Pose" went for intensity and succeeded. By choosing nontraditional subject matter (a girl in a cellar, following instructions from an off-screen voice, ostensibly the man holding the camera) and keeping the production simple, the film allowed Rodriquez's performance to enthrall the audience. "Baby Let's Play House," on the other hand, was much more narrative, following a plot involving a strange elderly couple, a man whose wife has left him and a na've Elvis impersonator and his wife, set in the Southern California desert. Mulholland Drive, anyone? The creepy old people were just as unusual as David Lynch's tiny elderly couple who crawl along the floor after that movie loses its mind, but "Baby Let's Play House" develops its characters, presents conflicts and intrigue and resolves them like a good short story. When the film began, I did not have high hopes, but by the end of it, my attention was fully captured.

Perhaps next year's SunDeis would do well to cut a few of the melodramatic, clumsy works that only serve to make the audience uncomfortable (and not in a good way) and emphasize their more artistic, humorous and thought-provoking works. The true drama at SunDeis this year was achieved through documentaries like Rodriguez's "The Pose," not through films about weighty issues like crime and depression.