Effigy: Students’ documentary short brings a New London tradition to Rome

When Benedict Arnold defected to the British during the American Revolution, he likely didn’t imagine a crowd would burn him in effigy some 240 years later as part of an annual event in the very city he sought to reduce to ash. And given the concept of film didn’t even exist in the 1780s, he certainly would’ve had no idea that a pair of Connecticut College students would make a documentary short about that tradition that would send them to Italy and The COLiseum International Film FEstival (COLIFFE).

Unfortunately for America’s most famous traitor, the future has a way of being unpredictable. Meanwhile, filmmakers Timothy Friend ’25 and Ian Hopkins ’25, the Camels behind Effigy, couldn’t be happier with the outcome.

In the doc, they mix on-site interviews with footage of the 2023 Flock Theatre Burning of Benedict Arnold Festival. The result is a blast of experiential storytelling that allows the viewer to feel like part of the festival while also maintaining enough distance to provide context and insight.

Friend and Hopkins were still in their first week of a fall semester “Documentary Production” course when Hopkins got an email from Flock advertising the festival. “I thought, ‘Oh, we should totally film this,’” recalls Hopkins, a film studies major from Chicago, Illinois. “We had to get special permission for it because it was so early in the semester.”

With Professor Ross Morin’s approval, the two set to work.

“We started with [the festival] because it would be really fun, but we started to think, ‘How can we find a larger meaning in this?’” explains Friend, who hails from West Newbury, Massachusetts, and is also majoring in film.

Given the current state of American politics, the two quickly found deeper meaning in an annual tradition of using fire to purge historical monsters. But finding the right tone proved more difficult.

“Our rough cut … went too far over the edge of politics. Professor Morin was critical in guiding us through fixing that,” Hopkins says.

The final cut still pulses with political implication, but by avoiding didactic messaging, Effigy takes on an evergreen quality. It is about 2023 and 1781, of course, but one can easily see America’s other crises, past and yet to be, in the “mob’s” actions, and hear them in the participants’ voices.

Friend and Hopkins also credit Conn’s film studies technician Greg Surman with helping them through a range of challenges, including no opportunities for retakes, the need to quickly master a shoulder mount and monopod, and the darkness of late-night New London.

“He was so accommodating,” Hopkins says. “He was like, ‘This is a really cool idea. You’ll figure it out and hit the ground running and we’ll get you what you need.’”

After presenting the film in class as part of a semester’s-end screening event, Friend submitted Effigy to COLIFFE. He learned in December that the film had been accepted.

The festival received 1,778 submissions from 108 countries; of those, only 140 reached the final phase. Effigy then went on to snag a Best Direction Award in the International Short Films category for the duo.

Winning was “very validating,” Friend says.

While interest in the film continues—it was screened at the Flame University FirstCut Film Festival in India just last week—Hopkins and Friend are both hard at work with new collaborators on projects for their “Film 310: Ideological Representation in Motion Picture Production” course. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t still working together.

“We’ll be crewing each other’s films,” Hopkins says.

“That’s how it is with film here,” adds Friend. “We are all involved, helping, even if we aren’t partners.”