South Bay students clean up in short film contest

Students from high schools in Cupertino and Sunnyvale cleaned up in the EmPower Silicon Valley Short Film Competition sponsored by Silicon Valley Clean Energy (SVCE).

The Sunnyvale-based green energy aggregator asked local students to make films that illustrate how individuals and communities can combat climate change.

Six students from two high schools in the Fremont Union High School District were awarded $3,000 scholarships for their efforts. At Cupertino High School, Xinpei Lu won the Energy Impact Award for “A Future Without Car Dependency,” and Alyssa Hwang took home the Creative Presentation Award for “For the Sake of the Planet.”

Monta Vista High School was represented by Hernan Maldonado and Abhik Das, who won the Energy Innovation Award for “Acoustic Energy,” and by Elise Chiu and Nishika Gorla, who earned the Community Engagement Award for “Putting Out the Global Fire.”

Among the entrants who won honorable mention awards of $2,000 each were Ben Richardson from Monta Vista High School and Christopher Li and Emily Chen from Lynbrook High School for “Silicon Valley: A (Clean Energy) Future Worth Investing In.”

Fremont High School student Seeun Kim teamed with Ava Mineishi from Branham High School in the Campbell Union School District on the short film “The Silicon Green Vision,” which earned them an honorable mention.

The EmPower Silicon Valley Competition is an SVCE education initiative. The short films were judged by a panel of SVCE board members, youth, community leaders and film industry professionals.

“We were impressed by the ingenuity and diversity of the submitted films,” SVCE CEO Girish Balachandran said in a statement.

“Representing the next generation, youth make up a core component of the SVCE mission to combat climate change and ensure a clean energy future. The students’ visions of this future were inspiring and uplifting.”

View the winning short films at SVCleanEnergy.org/Empower-SV.