By Allysia Ruggiero
Photo by Nicole Villalobos

Elias Olsen graduated from Ithaca College this past December, with a degree in documentary studies. His course work was largely focused on film. A short film that he and his fellow students produced, called “Stew,” recently won an award at the Outer Docs Film Festival in Ithaca, N.Y.

As part of his coursework in his junior year, he and his classmates were given the assignment of creating a documentary film. The students had a semester to pitch their ideas, get into groups, and create and finish their films. Olsen pitched the idea in class, and shortly afterward he began working on the film with his group mates. 

It took the group, which, in addition to Olsen, comprised Caroline Bissaillon, Alex Klein and Clara Montague, between three and four months to finish the filming and editing process. All four of them worked on various parts of the documentary, which included interviewing, preproduction, sound recording, filming and editing. The documentary is about a man in Winsted who works on Jaguar cars. Stew Jones lost his sight at age 40 in a car accident, but he hasn’t let that stop him from pursuing his passion, restoring vintage Jaguar E-type cars.

After they finished their assignment, Olsen and his colleagues submitted the film to several film festivals. They were invited to screen their film at Outer Docs Film Festival in Ithaca, ultimately winning in the category of Best Student/Local Film last November. 

This was the first time Olsen had done such a cohesive, finished project, “It was my first real project where we filmed everything, and edited everything, start to end. . . . It was a very rewarding process.” 

“Stew” was recently accepted by the Reality Bytes Independent Student Film Festival at Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb, Ill., but owing to the coronavirus crisis, screening has been postponed until the fall. The film can be watched on YouTube now at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxfTLC3EZQ0, and the website for Stew John’s business is http://www.jaguarv12etype.com/index.html. 

Olsen is continuing to work on films. He is currently finishing a project he started in his last semester at college. Called “A Bunch of Sticks,” the documentary is about a Cambodian-American boy named Maddox who is trying to rediscover his family’s heritage through traditional dance.