Chenxu Yu is proud of the films he’s been producing over the past year.
But the Saint John’s University senior didn’t expect much to come from submitting some of them for consideration in this year’s Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Festival of the Media Arts contest.
After all, no student at SJU or the College of Saint Benedict had ever won a BEA award, which is considered to be one of the highest honors a student broadcaster or filmmaker can attain.
“Ethan Wittrock (an instructional technology specialist at CSB and SJU and the advisor to Johnnie Bennie Media) asked me to turn them in,” Yu said. “I knew they were good, but I wasn’t expecting to win.”
It turns out Yu was underestimating his chances. He was informed earlier this month that he has been honored with three separate BEA “Awards of Excellence” special distinctions.
His film “Embrace Uncertainty” was honored in the Student Film and Video Competition’s animation category and his films “Can I Smoke in Your Car?” and “See You One Last Time” were honored in the narrative category.
“I put a lot of time and hard work into them last summer and last semester,” said Yu, who produced the films as part of his senior thesis, and as examples to be submitted as part of applications to graduate schools.
“So it’s nice to see them being honored in this way.”
This year’s BEA honorees were selected from a pool of 2,285 entries, representing over 300 colleges and universities, and Wittrock said it is incredibly prestigious for CSB and SJU to have a recipient among that group.
“(Yu) is really reaching new territory for (CSB and SJU),” Wittrock said. “He’s putting (these schools) on the national stage. The BEA is recognized nationally as one of the biggest competitions there is, so to have one of our students’ work honored is a really big deal.”
Yu attended high school in Chengdu, China – the capital city of the Sichuan province. He was interested in attending college in the U.S. and two of his high school teachers had graduated from CSB and SJU.
“One of them talked a lot about his experiences here, and I also had the chance to visit in 2019 and really liked it,” he said.
He explored photography in high school, but said filmmaking was not on his radar until he arrived at CSB and SJU.
“I took some film studies classes and media production classes, and I really liked them,” said Yu, a double major in studio art and individualized film. “It became something I really enjoy.”
Yu – who has worked for Johnnie Bennie Media in the past – is this year’s co-director of Extending the Link – a non-profit, student-founded and student-run group that creates short documentary films dealing with under-reported global social justice issues.
This year’s documentary – entitled “Fast Fashion and Consumerism in Japan” – is scheduled to premiere as part of Celebrating Scholarship and Creativity Day on May 1.
It’s been a valuable experience for Yu, who hopes to one day embark on a career in the television or film industry.
“I like the narrative aspect of (filmmaking),” he said. “The way we can tell stories visually. It’s a very humanized form of language, but also very complicated.”