And the Oscar goes to...
Excerpt:
"The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has selected a University of Michigan graduate's undergrad thesis film (Perry Janes' "Zug") as one of 15 winners in this year's Student Academy Awards competition. This is the first time in the history of the Student Academy Awards (which began in 1972) that a film by a U-M student has won.
Janes, who grew up in different parts of metro Detroit (most recently Royal Oak), based "Zug" on a short story he’d written about two young men who are dared by classmates to visit mysterious Zug Island.
"That's the coming of age, narrative, literal story of the film," Janes said. "The thematic idea of the film is that Detroit is a really polarizing place that people talk about in terms of extremes, when the reality of the place is … that these are regular people just living in the city, living their lives. These are two boys who, by virtue of having one foot in the city, one foot outside of it, get sucked into those mythic narratives. And then Zug becomes an allegory for testing them, and affirming the maybe more comforting reality underneath the way that people talk about (Detroit)."
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