The university's film institution at boundary, and the founder-across-the-line test

1990–2027 · NOTRE DAME'S FESTIVAL, AND THE TESTED REMAINDER

The institution: Notre Dame's Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT) runs the county's durable film institution — the Notre Dame Student Film Festival, founded by Ted Mandell in 1990: the department's own pages count the 36th annual festival on 24–25 January 2025 and the 37th in January 2026, with tentative 38th dates of 29–31 January 2027; its alumni include Sundance winners Peter Richardson and John Hibey, and audiences have voted an audience-choice award since 2013. Beside it stands the university's media arm, Fighting Irish Media (Fighting Irish Digital Media), for which Mandell also produces — the professor who founded the festival is the thread between the classroom institution and the broadcast one, and both are Notre Dame's at boundary size. The founder-across-the-line test, which is this branch's closing question: whether any of it runs back to an Osceola founder, resident or seat was tested against the institutions dug in rows #679–#682 — the two campus productions, Golden Dome Productions, the River Bend Festival, the Student Film Festival — and no Osceola-resident founder, officer or seat was found in any of them: Mandell is Notre Dame faculty, the festival's founders were South Bend filmmakers, Golden Dome is a university office. Printed with the local negatives of the preceding articles, the tested remainder is the branch's whole answer for the town: Osceola appears in the county's film history as an audience — in the seats at the South Bend premieres, in front of WSBT's cameras' reach, at the music festival of its own — and never once, in any record this run could reach, behind a camera of its own.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame, Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (ftt.nd.edu) — the Notre Dame Student Film Festival founded by Ted Mandell, 1990; 36th annual 24–25 Jan. 2025; 37th Jan. 2026; tentative 38th dates 29–31 Jan. 2027; alumni Sundance winners Peter Richardson and John Hibey; audience-choice voting since 2013; Fighting Irish Media / Fighting Irish Digital Media (Mandell, producer).
2. Rows #679–#682 of this section — the institutions against which the founder test was run, with their own sources: the Notre Dame production record; Notre Dame Archives GDM; the River Bend Film Festival record.