Jennifer Karre juggles her classes and the many hours incorporated with promoting the Big Muddy Film Festival because she knows how essential it is to have students continue to keep the festival running.

There’s plenty of festivals in this country that are run by big corporations, said Karre, a junior in cinema and photography from Des Moines, Iowa. It’s important for the students to get involved in it and know what’s going on to give it a different slant that will set it apart from the rest of the festivals.

There are about 25 students volunteering their time to run the Big Muddy this year. Though Film Alternatives Executive Director Ben Nemenoff said the number of students involved depends on the day you catch us, the commitment to the spirit of independent films is still present.

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I think the reason the festival works is because the people that are involved are really dedicated to it, he said.

Karre’s duties include putting advertisements in local and national magazines and writing press releases, and her work begins in mid-fall and is in full swing by the end of the fall semester.

Screening committee chairwoman Farita Pacha, a graduate student from India, was part of the eight-person group that decided which of the 191 entries were going to be part of this year’s Big Muddy.

The group divided into two subsections and split the films in half, but the screening process still took three full days to view and rate the entire arsenal of entries.

The films were rated scored by three criteria. The first was technical quality, which includes lighting, editing and cinematography. The second criteria was concept, which measured the originality of the film, and the third was artistic quality, which graded the picture’s effective use of film as a medium.

As expected, not all films made the Big Muddy cut. Pacha found some downright painful to watch.

There were a lot of crappy films, she said. A lot of us involved make films, too, and we have maybe made only one film. After looking at some that stuff we thought, Well, at least we’re not that bad.’ Cinema and photography professor and one of the founding students of the festival Mike Covell said keeping the festival student run keeps engages volunteers in the world of independent films.

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If it is indeed student run, then it shows a need and an interest to do a festival, he said. As long as there are students around with the energy to do it, and to be able to step forward in a volunteer fashion to run the festival, it shows a healthy interest in independent film and in the department on campus as well as in the community.

Whether the interest in independent films is there or not, Karre wishes there was more of an interest in putting together the festival.

We could always use more people, she said. Things get done, but we could always use more people.