MFA candidate’s short film nominated for Student Academy Awards

From the age of 10, Balbinka Korzeniowska had been practicing her Oscar speech, transforming her bathroom into the plush Dolby Theatre and her shampoo bottle into a microphone.

On Sept. 17, at the Student Academy Awards ceremony, the UCLA student may finally get to take to the stage and make that speech for her short film “Awaken.” She said she will be honored to walk her mother down the red carpet as her date, having watched the Oscars with her as a yearly tradition.

The Student Academy Awards were established by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to support student filmmakers and recognize their work. This year will be the 42nd incarnation, and past winners include “Toy Story” director John Lasseter and “Malcolm X” director Spike Lee.

Korzeniowska’s “Awaken” has been chosen as a finalist in the alternative category, and will compete with four student-made films from other colleges. The film centers around a woman encased inside a sculpture who awakens when a hawk lands on her arm.

Korzeniowska decided to submit the film a few months ago for consideration when she realized it would not fit in at any traditional film festivals. She said she read the premise for the alternative category, which includes movies that reinterpret traditional filmic elements such as plot, time and space, and realized that it precisely captured her film’s avant-garde style of storytelling.

As an MFA Directing candidate at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, Korzeniowska said she felt ready to take the life stories she’d learned and experienced, and bring them to an audience. She described “Awaken” as a coming-of-age story set in an experimental bondage scenario.

“It represents the emergence of myself as an artist, as a woman and as a human being in society,” Korzeniowska said.

The film, shot in slow motion, depicts an artist played by professional metal sculptor Tadeusz Torzecki, as he creates a female, bird-like statue that comes to life. Korzeniowska plays the woman trapped inside the statue, who emerges from the mold and frees herself from her creator’s clutches with the help of a swooping red-tailed hawk.

Korzeniowska came up with the initial concept for “Awaken” while in an experimental media class, she said. Her professor, Fabian Wagmister, said she was trying to design a live experience that was part installation, part performance, part film.

“For me, the film is about what it means to create; it’s about the labor and the process behind creation,” Wagmister said.

Paul Cannon, the director of photography on “Awaken” and fellow MFA candidate, described Korzeniowska’s style of filmmaking as sexy, stylish and visual. He said that her experiences as a model, actor and now director have given her a well-rounded perspective on the creation process.

Cannon and Korzeniowska agreed that the main challenge in filming “Awaken,” was getting the hawk to fly on command and land in the right position.

“Hawks are very smart, very easily trained because they’re trained with food. However, as a vegetarian, I wasn’t very comfortable having this piece of rabbit on my arm so that the hawk could land on it,” Korzeniowska said.

She said she even went as far as having a casting call for the part of the bird, with Marshall the red-tailed hawk emerging as the perfect choice because of her sensitive, delicate temperament and her striking features.

The decision to film in slow motion added an extra layer of complication to the piece because of the slow pace and the high frame rate. Korzeniowska said she had to stare fixedly at one spot for 30 minutes to get the right shot.

She described the process of making the film as painstaking yet empowering. She said the artist created the sculpture based on kinetics so that if she spread her own arms, the wings of the sculpture would spread as well.

“I was encased in this 700-pound sculpture with a real hawk landing on me,” Korzeniowska said. “I felt pretty powerful at that point in time.”

Korzeniowska said she hopes that through “Awaken,” she has created a piece of art that people will remember.

“When the live hawk landed on me with his talons, he could have killed me then and there,” Korzeniowska said. “But I was so resilient in hoping that he wouldn’t, for the sake of creating something beautiful and powerful and lasting in people’s minds.”