You are here: Hunter College crashes the Moroccan party

Sometimes it feels as though the Tribeca Film Festival never really ends. Case in point: Tomorrow is the early application deadline for the 2006 festival--set for April 25-May 7, by the way--and now a couple of guys you may have heard of are taking the Tribeca cause into the sandy yonder:

In an effort to support emerging filmmakers from across the globe and to promote diverse voices in film, the Tribeca Film Institute has joined forces with the Marrakech International Film Festival Foundation to create the Marrakech/Tribeca Filmmaker Exchange. Sixteen Moroccan and New York film students will participate in this exchange, to be held in Marrakech November 6-20, in conjunction with the 5th Marrakech International Film Festival, which runs November 11-19. ...

One of America’s most honored film directors, Martin Scorsese, will be joined by acclaimed Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami in offering master classes that are among the program’s core offerings. They will also be joined by actor Jeffrey Wright and filmmakers from both the U.S. and Morocco in presenting a series of events that will enable aspiring filmmakers from both countries to work together and learn from one another as they grapple with the intricacies of the filmmaking process.

And then their work gets shown at Tribeca in 2006. I mean, whoa. As it turns out, the "exchange students" involved are all from Hunter College's film program; feel free to direct only your purest film geek jealousy at grad students Chris Dapkins, Alana Kakoyiannis, Diana Logreira-Campos, Lenina Nadal, David Pavlosky and undergrads Ruomi Lee-Hampel, George Racz and Kim Spiegler. Their high-profile trip comes on the heels of Madonna doing a guest lecture gig and a few days prior to the beginning of Hunter's 11th annual Avignon Film Festival.

And to think: Reeler HQ is two subway stops from Hunter's front door, and I never had any idea they pulled this kind of world-class rank. So good--very good--on them; after all, why should Tribeca get all the glamour?