The annual Cannes and Sundance film festivals are months away, but independent filmmakers from across the country had the chance to show off their work in Cedar Rapids April 4 and 5.

The 2003 Cedar Rapids Film Festival workers sorted through 40 submitted independent films to pick 22 to be featured at the festival.

The films selected were created by local, regional and national filmmakers, two of whom were from Iowa State.

“I had no idea this festival existed,” says Andy Langager, graduate student in journalism and mass communication and runner-up in the Student Long Form category at the festival. “But we planned on submitting the film somewhere and it happened to be the Cedar Rapids one.”

Langager’s film, “Persistence of Vision,” was a documentary-style comedy about the making of a bad science fiction movie. The crew began filming in the summer of 2001 and took two-and-a-half months to complete the project.

Langager and his crew, which consisted of members of the journalism and mass communication electronic media class and other students from different majors, didn’t need a script, but instead started with a story line and added different gags and new tricks while shooting.

“We have all seen our fair share of bad movies,” Langager says. “We are fans of these movies, whether good or bad, so we just put that knowledge of bad to use.”

The other ISU winner was Dan Mundt, Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication lecturer. He was named runner-up in the Master Feature Film category.

“The award is nice to receive, but it doesn’t go to me — it goes to everyone who helped make the movie possible,” Mundt says. “I couldn’t do it without my crew, a very phenomenal crew.”

Mundt and his crew created a 95-minute film titled “Escape Velocity.”

It was inspired by numerous articles about World War II and several smaller ideas pertaining to women pilots.

The scene is set in 1945 and is about a young woman pilot in the Air Force who finds herself in the middle of a situation she never thought possible, Mundt says. The character must travel the globe, looking for her fighter plane.

“It took about 18 months to finish,” Mundt says. “We shot most of the scenes in the summer of 2000, only about 25 to 30 days out of the summer.

But it took about a month and a half to get the special effects worked out, and the several revisions that we added to the movie.”

The films were judged by a panel of three and the movies were shown to those who attended the festival. Langager didn’t attend but Mundt says the festival gave him inspiration for his next project.