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CSUN Student Shows Movie at Cannes Film Festival

(NORTHRIDGE, Calif., Sept. 17, 2007) — It’s a journey many would envy—from film school to Cannes—before you even graduate.

Spiros Stathoulopoulos spent his summer vacation between his junior and senior year making a movie. "PVC-1" tells the story of a middle-aged Colombian woman who couldn’t pay a $7,000 ransom, and as a result criminals hung around her neck a time bomb made of PVC-piping.

"I wrote it, directed it, did the camera work, produced it," Stathoulopoulos said of his self-financed, low-budget film, "and if there was editing, I would have edited it."

The movie needed no editing because he shot it in a single, continuous 85-minute take. "I had to train for three months to be able to support the weight for an extended time," he said. He carried his equipment while walking three miles, uphill and down, and through a river near a rural village about five hours from Bogotá, the capitol of Colombia.

Working in the South American country, with its reputation for drug cartels and murders, didn’t scare him because his family moved there when he was seven from Thessaloniki, Greece. He came to the United States five years ago to study.

He arrived on the campus of Cal State Northridge two years ago.

"At CSUN, I learned film production and screenwriting,” Stathoulopoulos said.

"He was a really inspired student. He really embraced the academic environment as a place to both learn and to experiment with his creative ideas," said Temma Kramer, a cinema and television arts professor who taught Stathoulopoulos.

"His movie is stunning," she added.

"PVC-1" was screened in France in May.

Out of thousands of films, "my film was one of 22 selected for the section called the Director’s Fortnight, the section from which Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee and Sophia Coppola were discovered," he said. "After my screening, I got chased by talent agents. I finally signed with a talent agency called Endeavor," which, he pointed out, also represents Scorsese.

His representatives are shopping the movie around. "Since Cannes, there have been a lot of distributors interested in buying it, but the agents are waiting to get the best offer," he said, and they are also pitching him to direct major motion pictures.

He’s busy taking meetings at studios and reading screenplays, but not too swamped to return to the CSUN campus. His film, "PVC-1", is going to be screened Oct. 17 at the Armer Theatre in the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communications, which will be followed by a question-and-answer session with Stathoulopoulos.

The screening is scheduled to take place at 7 p.m. For more information, call the Department of Cinema and Television Arts at (818) 677-3192.

California State University, Northridge has 34,500 full- and part-time students and offers 62 bachelor’s and 50 master’s degrees as well as 28 teaching credential programs. Founded in 1958, CSUN is among the largest single-campus universities in the nation and the only four-year public university in the San Fernando Valley. The university serves as the intellectual, economic and cultural heart of the Valley and beyond.