CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) — In the second year since its revival, the Virginia Student Film Festival is set to return to the Paramount Theater on April 4.

The festival will feature two curated screening blocks featuring a lineup of student films all under 15 minutes that has yet to be announced. The event will also feature a panel with the filmmakers, red carpet reception with free concessions and a professional photographer, and finally an award ceremony featuring an MC and dance performance.

The awards given to filmmakers at the show will also include prize money.

“We were thinking ambitiously,” VSFF President Ansh Pathapadu told Cville Right Now. “We wanted to differentiate ourselves from these other student film festivals by incorporating an award show, kind of like the Oscars.”

In addition to actual festival on Saturday, VSFF plans to host a film screening on Grounds on April 2, with the organization letting the public vote on which film they’d like to see through its Instagram.

The following day, VSFF is hosting a catered event at the Monroe Hill House that Pathapadu said it is hoping to have a panel of professors to give advice to student filmmakers. He added that one of the reasons for this event and the festival as a whole is to help consolidate the film community at UVA, which currently does not have a film program.

“It’s very scattered,” he said. “There’s media studies, there’s drama, there’s studio art. So we’re trying to bring these people together and that’s what we hope the event on Friday will be.”

But simply bringing back the festival last year following a four-year hiatus has already helped in that consolidation, according to some of Pathapadu’s fellow exec members.

Project Manager and Financial Chair Alena Touve, who is in her first year working with the festival, told Cville Right Now she has noticed people from different parts of the community already coming together for the festival, and that she herself, a media studies major who is “not super involved’ in the film community has made plenty of valuable connections.

“To be able to walk into a class where I know every single person in there because even if they’re not in the festival, I know they do film and I’ve met them and I’ve spoken to them,” she said. “That’s been a really great addition to my life.”

That consolidation has also allowed those interested in film at UVA to learn from each other. Marketing Co-Chair and founder of the university’s Screenwriting Club Rachel Conniff told Cville Right Now about how she wasn’t very familiar with the production side of filmmaking when she joined the festival this year.

“Working with the student film festival has been just a great opportunity [to] understand more the environment surrounding student films, and beyond just the ones submitted for the [festival],” she said.

With this year’s event just around the corner and UVA’s film community already preparing, Touve said the festival’s main goal between now and the event is to continue to spread awareness.

“UVA isn’t a super large school, but it is a pretty large community,” she said, “and so I think that’s going to be our main focus is making sure people know that it’s happening and making sure people know how they can get there.”

Still, even a month out, Conniff said she has begun to notice the festival’s Instagram account receiving more and more engagements as they’ve continued their outreach efforts.

“I think that will only increase as we keeping putting out more content and keep reposting and getting it spread around,” she said.

The festival will not only continue to serve as a hub for the UVA film community this year, but will also allow for student filmmakers to see their work screen at a major theater like The Paramount. Pathapadu said hosting the festival in the historic venue has been its goal from the beginning, and its been lucky enough to accomplish that goal for two straight years now.

He also said the best way people can support the festival is simple — attending the festival and its other events, and supporting its filmmakers.

“A lot of times, we make a movie and we just put it on YouTube and it just dies,” he said, “and sometimes that drive in us also kind of dies, and we’re losing out on so many budding filmmakers because they make one movie and people don’t watch it and they think that’s it.”

He added that he hopes people will give student filmmakers the support to keep creating, because if it’s not their best work, the fact that are still creating is “a feat of itself.”

“For people to go out and watch these films,” he said, “I think is all I could ask for.”