ASFA Film Fest opens student-made movies to Birmingham audience May 9

The Alabama School of Fine Arts is opening its student film program to Birmingham in a way that feels bigger than a school screening: the 3rd annual ASFA Film Fest will run May 9 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Dorothy Jemison Day Theater, with free admission and public access. Held in ASFA’s 500-seat venue, the festival puts student-made movies in front of a real city audience instead of a closed classroom crowd.

That matters because ASFA is not a side program or a weekend workshop. It is Alabama’s tuition-free, state-funded public school for grades 7 through 12, with specialty training in Creative Writing, Dance, Music, Theatre Arts, Visual Arts and Math-Science. The school says 350 students come from across Alabama, and its own outcomes page shows how seriously it treats the pipeline after graduation: 97% of graduates continue to higher education, 91% of recent seniors earned merit scholarships, and recent graduates have collected $48.57 million in merit scholarships over the past five years.

For the film fest, that larger mission is the point. ASFA says its community engagement and performance season are meant to give the public accessible arts and sciences experiences, and the film festival fits that model neatly. Students get a chance to see how pacing plays in a 500-seat theater, how sound carries in a live room, and how image choices land when an audience is actually watching together. For Birmingham’s indie scene, that kind of public screening builds the habits that matter: making work for viewers, not just for a phone screen.

ASFA has also been pushing cross-disciplinary storytelling in ways that make the festival feel like a preview of where its students are headed. On March 19, the school posted “From Research to Film,” about Math-Science students learning to communicate research to a broader public audience. In 2024, ASFA also connected dance and creative writing students to a Sidewalk Film Festival project shaped by faculty member Germaul Barnes. Those projects suggest a school where film is not isolated from the rest of the arts, but connected to performance, writing and presentation.

That is why the ASFA Film Fest matters beyond one Saturday in May. It gives families, teachers and curious neighbors an early look at students who are already learning how to think visually, tell a story and work in public. In a state still building its film infrastructure, that kind of audience-facing training is where the next generation begins.