As part of the packed schedule for Festival of the Creative Arts weekend, two Brandeis filmmakers screened their latest collaborative efforts in the Mandel Center for the Humanities auditorium on Saturday night. Aaron Berke '12 and Mark Dellelo, the director of the Getz Multimedia Lab and Film, Television and Interactive studies lecturer, worked together, along with a crew of Brandeis students, on Three Readers and The Note-two short films that shone with creativity.

The two films featured the same cast members, mainly young Boston-area professionals, and were shot in the same time frame. According to Dellelo and Berke, Three Readers was a side project that provided some comedic relief as the cast and crew were working on the dark thriller The Note.

Three Readers, which was written and directed by Dellelo, is a 10-minute comedy about a young man obsessed with literature. It started with two men, Josh (Alex McIsaac) and David (Jerry Dwyer Jr.) sitting in a park discussing books. The scene was shot at Chapels Pond, creating a pleasant moment of recognition for the Brandeis students in the audience.

As the two characters talk, the film flashes back to an earlier phone conversation that they had about Italian post-modernism and reading as a metaphor for making love. Josh is sitting in bed, and it becomes clear that the girl he is dating, Anne (Judith Kaloara), is waiting for him to get off the phone so she can seduce him. A series of comedic events occur, including Josh clumsily falling off the bed after hanging up the phone. By the end of the film, the relationships between the three have completely reversed and David and Anne are beginning to get involved, completing their comical love triangle. 

Saturday's event took a darker turn when the next film, The Note, began. Written and directed by Berke, this film featured McIsaac and Dwyer as brothers named Dane and Will, with Kaloara playing their mother and Robert Murphy playing their father.

The Note follows the family as they fall apart in a whirlwind of death, deception and drugs. The mother is a psychic and, throughout the film, has a sinister hypnotic hold on Will, who is trying to learn her magic. Dane, who is closer to the boys' father, tries to break the strange connection as his fears grow about the frightening influence that their mother has on his brother. The film's climax is thrilling, with several scenes of death and near-death, as Dane fights to free Will from their mother's grasp. I won't spoil the ending, but it becomes clear that the mother has had a poisonous effect on each member of the family, including herself.

Objects are very important and symbolic throughout the film, from a baseball, to the family's house, to a cryptic note-the namesake of the movie. These objects all represent different characters or forces, and each of them is both successful and powerful as a symbol.

I enjoyed both films for different reasons. Three Readers, though it had less production value, was clever and engaging. The Note was masterful in its use of imagery and suspense; it was gripping and had me worrying and wondering about what would happen to the two brothers.

Both films followed an interesting chronology, flipping back and forth between time frames in the style of director Christopher Nolan's Memento, said Alex Weick '15, who moderated a short discussion with the filmmakers after the screening. Dwyer and McIsaac, who were also present for the discussion, both said they greatly enjoyed working with Dellelo and Berke and had a good time making the two films.

Ellen Goldman, who does not attend the University, and Shane Weitzman '16, who attended the screening, were split on which of the two movies was better. "I ... thought that The Note was better than Three Readers; obviously a lot more work went into it," said Goldman. "I especially liked the color schemes, the color temperatures changed with the room, and it ... evoked that they were suffocating in the house."

Because of its superior production quality and more complex story, The Note was definitely a better film than Three Readers. However, the screening was a cooperative, friendly affair rather than a contest, and in my opinion, both films are worthy of praise.