Ben Kahn had one big dream as a kid: He wanted to make movies. He remembers making stop-motion movies with his action figures in the sandbox at his Shelburne home.
“I had grown up always knowing that I wanted to work in film since before I really knew what it meant,” he said.
Champlain Valley Union High School didn’t have an audio-visual club when he was a student there, but some teachers let the 1994 graduate submit films rather than written papers for projects. He went once a week to South Burlington High School, where his father, Tim, taught French, to work on films with the school’s award-winning technology and imaging lab.
Move ahead three decades and Kahn’s past life has caught up with him in a big way. He worked as the first assistant director on “Past Lives,” which was nominated Jan. 23 for an Academy Award for Best Picture. The film also earned a nod for Best Original Screenplay by first-time director Celine Song.
Kahn described “Past Lives” as a film with “quiet emotional resonance and a lot of subtext.” The award-season recognition provides a big boost for such a subtle movie, according to Kahn.
“It’s validation that this kind of film can still resonate,” Kahn told the Burlington Free Press in a phone conversation the day before the Oscar nominations came out but after a series of nods from other film awards.