Barrington High students earn spot at White House film festival

For the second year in a row, television production students from Barrington High School have won a spot at The White House Student Film Festival in Washington D.C., beating out entries from hundreds of other schools across the country.

"We're over the moon we're so excited," said Layne Lindroth, a senior who will travel to the nation's capitol next month with classmates Kim Kazanowski, Jan Gierlach and their BHS-TV teacher Jeff Doles.

The films submitted had to be less than three minutes long and had to relate to this year's theme "The World I Want To Live In."

The Barrington High submission, titled "Remember the Past, Transform the Future," features an interview the students did with Sam Harris, a Holocaust survivor and the president emeritus of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie. Harris discussed the horrors of the Holocaust and how lucky he felt to be in the United States.

"In the future, as in the present, I want to be in a world where we accentuate the word 'freedom,'" Harris says in the video. "That's what this country is all about."

Lindroth said they approached Harris about being in the video in the spring after he spoke at Prairie Middle School. She said Harris was more receptive to the idea than they could have expected. They were hoping for five minutes of his time and he gave them so much more.

"'Let's get you to the White House,'" Lindroth recalled Harris telling them when they first met. "We called (Harris and his wife, Dede) yesterday, they may be more excited than us."

Last year, Barrington High students Arianna Baldassano and Anusha Panchal got an invitation to the White House, and met President Barack Obama and other talented students from across the country.

Lindroth, who has been a BHS-TV student since her freshman year, said she will never forget being selected.

"It is my biggest accomplishment in this class, which I owe so much to already," she said.