By Christian Mignot

Muralist, filmmaker and Mountain View High School graduate (class of 1992) Chris Halmo has begun his career in the film industry in great style. Halmo was recently awarded first place in the Berkeley Film Festival for his film school thesis work, “These Wild Woods.”

The 15-minute film tells the story of a young boy, confined by the strict boundaries of his grandfather’s farm, who finds himself enchanted by a mysterious girl on a horse at the edge of the forest.

“Many of the ideas came from my childhood experiences on our family’s farm up in Anderson Valley,” Halmo said. The film was actually shot in Boonville and Philo, 116 miles northwest of San Francisco.

During his high school years, Halmo was extensively involved in the Los Altos mural project, a 29-year-old program based at Blach Middle School. Along with other students, he painted replicas of masterpieces by artists such as Botticelli, da Vinci and Renoir. He also founded, with Clay Cahoon, the Covington Musée, a mural workshop for secondary and collegiate level art students.

Halmo’s interest in film began during high school.

“When I contracted Guillain-Barré disease, I had to stay home instead of going to school. All I did was watch movies all day. After a while, I realized that I really wanted to become involved in film,” he said.

Frank Navarro, Halmo’s history and English teacher at the time, recalled, “We often talked about what is involved in telling a story, the fact that you have to pull it out from within yourself. Chris is an extremely talented man. He was very responsive, and although he was 17 when I taught him, he really had the maturity of someone five years older.”

In 1994, Halmo transferred to the University of California at Los Angeles, where he majored in English and minored in film. Following this, he attended graduate film school at the University of Southern California.

“Film was really the logical next step as an artist for me,” Halmo said. “It involved a combination of image and word, thus pulling on my experiences as a muralist and the work I had done for my English degree.”

Fresh out of graduate school, Halmo now looks ahead eagerly to a career in the film/television industry. He has started his own production company, Casa Giallo, named after his great-grandfather’s house in a village near Genoa, Italy.

“I would like to work as a feature film director. For the moment, however, I hope to direct some commercials perhaps, maybe some documentaries,” he said.

Halmo also seeks to work with the experimental trip-hop group Supreme Beings of Leisure on one of their upcoming music videos.