Between 2013-2014, during my second year at New Canaan High School I began a Film Club with a group of friends who loved film just as much as me. The projects in this club would include writing scripts, producing and editing short films, watching films, learning new techniques and more.

My friend Jenny and I also decided to pitch and idea to our Documentary Film teacher: we proposed we could spend the year with Film Club planning our town’s first film festival in addition to other creative activities. We presented this idea to the school's art department and they couldn't be more excited to take on this journey with us. We started the club with our film teacher, Mrs. Sinski, who became the advisor along with an awesome team of creative students excited to make this come true. I don’t want to spoil much, but 10 years later and hopefully as you’re reading this, the festival is still happening.

We went on to spend our entire second and third year planning out dates, designing a website, posters, canvassing materials, reserving a venue, looking for sponsors and donators- amongst a million other tasks we were suddenly faced with. We sent out many invites to different schools in Connecticut to participate and submit their films as well as many invites to different filmmakers around the area to be jurors and pick out our winners for our categories.

At the end of the year in 2015 we finally had the festival ready. We had food, VIP check in, hosts for the award ceremony, professional lighting equipment, posters, many sponsors including Karl Chevrolet, our local theatre, Family Britches and many others.

15 students joined our film club, we had 72 hours throughout 9 months to make the event happen.
75 student films submitted from 12 different high schools and 32 volunteers for the night. 

That’s what it took to pull together New Canaan’s first Film Festival. We were 15!

The New Age Film Festival still runs every year in New Canaan.

In 2020, the New Age Film Festival’s Juror was Michael "Mike" McCusker, a film editor who has been nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing. “His first nomination was for Walk The Line and the second for Ford v Ferrari in which he recently took home the Oscar for! McCusker stated that editing is "a dance of the eyes. It's not just splicing two pieces of film together but compressing time, leading the audience, telling the story through images and dialogue." Michael McCusker attended New Canaan High School where he first began writing and making films. After graduation, he attended Emerson College, obtaining a bachelor of fine arts degree in film theory and production.” (Source)