MICHAEL Aronson remembers the moment he decided to become a filmmaker.

   It was a Wednesday night. Then an undergrad at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, he went to the Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival on campus.

   ”I saw a film called ‘Days of Being Wild’ by Kar Wai Wong and I was so incredibly moved by a scene when Maggie Cheung (and other actresses) talk about being women and friends,” Mr. Aronson says during a telephone interview from California. “I just remember the aesthetic and the way everything fit into this world (of the movie). I never saw anything like that before. I knew after seeing that, I had to learn more and dig deeper. I guess I never saw film as an art form before that.”

   Mr. Aronson grew up in Manalapan and is a film student at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. His 13-minute film, “Shutter,” is among the works to be shown at the Princeton Student Film & Video Festival at the Princeton Public Library July 22 and 23.

   The festival is a forum for high school- and college-age filmmakers to show their movies. This year marks the sixth edition of the festival and will include 18 films (up to 20 minutes in length) covering animation, documentary and short features.

   ”Shutter” is about a woman dealing with the loss of a lover. She attempts to re-create a photograph of the two of them in order to relive a moment they shared together. Mr. Aronson says the movie has a narrative, but also an experimental nature to it. It was made as a school project, the parameters for which included the film have no dialogue.

   ”We didn’t have a script but everyone knew the story, everyone knew what this woman was going through,” he says. “We all kind of discovered it together, which was very nice.”

   When asked what he wants audiences to take from his film’s story, Mr. Aronson says he wants people to be moved by it.

   ”There’s something of a downer about it, but I want people to learn something about loss and coping with loss,” he says. “Sometimes the memory of something is better than what you want. You can never re-create something you’ve lost, it’s gone and the memory is the best part.”

   Another film on the festival’s bill is “Strata,” an animated short by Amy Kawabata of West Windsor. The movie, which mixes two-dimensional and three-dimensional animation, tells the story of a girl who finds a magical world through a puddle in the forest, where she meets a boy.

   ”They begin to interact and unfortunately they’re separated by their parents who close off the porthole between the worlds,” says Ms. Kawabata, who recently graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology. She created all the animation for her movie, which is black and white. The two characters appear in shadow and were created via 3-D animation. “Strata” was Ms. Kawabata’s senior thesis and took her about a year to finish.

   In thinking up a story for the project, she noticed someone throwing out some trash at a rest stop while driving back to school. “I was thinking, What if that trash didn’t end up on the ground, what if there was something else that happened to it underground,” Ms. Kawabata says.

   Susan Conlon, the PPL’s teen services librarian and the coordinator of the film festival, says the showcase has grown from its first year in 2004 when 10 movies were submitted. The number of submitted films has grown each year, up to 115 for this year’s edition. A selection committee including Ms. Conlon, other library staff members and community members chooses which films will be shown.

   Things have changed from that first festival, which consisted of all 10 films that were submitted. Some good movies have to be left off the bill, Ms. Conlon says. The goal is to present an evening of quality films in various genres.

   ”I’ve seen other festivals where they just put a lot of stuff in and they run on endlessly and they have very small audiences,” she says. “We have a really great, enthusiastic audience each night. We get large crowds so we’re really trying to make it, obviously, to the benefit of the filmmakers but to also make a dynamic program that people can enjoy.”

   Another consideration is making sure that debut films by area students are included in the festival. “We try to make room for a little bit of everything,” Ms. Conlon says.

   The approach has led to the festival winning an award from Voice of Youth Advocates, a journal for librarians and educators working with young adults. Ms. Conlon wrote an article for the publication about the festival and has given workshops to other libraries about starting their own student film festivals.

   ”It’s kind of catching on,” she says.