La Cena: A Spotlight

By Lucas Huss 

Luke Konjoyan is an aspiring filmmaker and junior at Morro Bay High School. In the past weeks, he’s begun his film festival project: an experimental foreign language film exploring the depravities of humanity and the horrors of masculinity. Entitled La Cena, it details the  meeting of a man and a woman, who the man invites over for dinner. The man then gives her a “gift,” and the rest of the film’s plot will hopefully be able to be viewed at the Morro Bay High School Film Festival.

Konjoyan says, “it was really just a big collaboration between you, me, Jake, Sean and Eli. Jake and I kind of took a back seat too, you and Sean wrote most of it.” While Luke prefers not to take ownership of the process of the film, he was instrumental in creating one of the film’s more notable scenes, one I cannot leak before the film potentially premieres on May 13th. “I don’t really wanna take credit for [the idea behind the film], but I think some of the creative input I had definitely made some stuff more fun.” One prop we used initially was written specifically in the script, though with his artistic decision, revised the choice into an alternate weapon in one of the most important scenes within the film.

Luke also took a more minor role within the film itself as one of the dinner guests who takes part in the titular “cena,” which means dinner in Spanish. Konjoyan, a student in the TV/Video class here at MBHS also aided with some of the camera work in the film, helping our main cinematographer Eli Waldman.

Luke Konjoyan’s film was ultimately not selected, but he will still be present at the film festival to cheer on his fellow filmmakers and view what they have made and what was selected!