Robert Redford, move over. There’s a new Sundance Kid in town, and she’s a movie-mad Jewish 13-year-old from the South Bay.
Shelby Rachleff may still be a few years away from getting her learner’s permit, but she is the driving force behind the Windy Hill Kids Film Festival, a Bay Area-wide contest for budding Spielbergs and Scorceses.
Students in grades four through 12 are eligible to enter their homemade movies in the event, which will take place from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, April 9, at Menlo School, 50 Valparaiso Ave., Atherton.
Rachleff isn’t doing this on the cheap. The Portola Valley seventh-grader put together a working budget of $800. Festival judges will be legitimate film and television industry representatives, including Portola Valley native and MTV veejay Gardner Loulan. In addition, prizes will be awarded to winners in a variety of categories including drama, comedy, documentary, instructional, animation and music video.
So far, Rachleff has done most of the heavy lifting. “I am doing 80 percent of the work,” she says. (An adult friend is helping with marketing and budgeting advice.) Rachleff’s work includes distributing fliers, putting up posters and generally getting the word out. “So far,” adds Rachleff, “I have 15 films.”
One is her own, a work-in-progress documentary shot in Telluride, Colo., and edited on her home Apple using iMovie software. The subject matter is apropos, since attending the Telluride Film Festival last summer with her family gave Rachleff the idea for the event in the first place.
“I wondered why can’t kids enter,” she recalls. “Kids are the future filmmakers. They should be able to do this.”
It wasn’t a stretch for Rachleff personally. Three summers ago, she attended iD Tech Camps, a weeklong technology program for kids at Stanford University. There she studied Web design and digital video production.
“It taught me so much about moviemaking,” she says of the program. “Most of my movies were pretty silly, but I fell in love with everything about it. It fueled my interest in future projects.”
The movie business has always been a welcoming industry for Jews, so Rachleff should feel right at home. Her family has belonged to Congregation Etz Chayim in Palo Alto for years, and maintaining a Jewish identity is important to Rachleff.
“I think religion is important,” she says. “It does affect my life and provides a moral belief for me. I’m very interested in studying the teen programs at my temple.”
She will have to pencil it in. Between school, the film festival and other passions like skiing and volleyball, Rachleff is a very busy girl. But she is already quite sure of her ultimate career goal.
“I would like to do something in film when I grow up,” she says. “The perfect career would be reading books and trying to turn them into screenplays.”
She’s been doing that for several years already, just not for pay. And it looks like she won’t be taking home any prize money at her Windy Hill Kids Film Festival either, even though she’s entering her film and the whole project is her baby.
Says Rachleff: “I’m not eligible to win.”
Students interested in entering the Windy Hill Kids Film Festival should write to windyhillfilmfest.yahoo.com for rules and an entry form. The deadline is March 21.