Stanford students made some movies and, last Friday, at the Stanford Film Society’s annual Student Film Festival, I got to judge them. Sixteen short films competed for prizes in five categories: best comedy, best documentary, best music video, best screenplay and “audience favorite.”

My co-judge, Adam Tobin, and I awarded best comedy to Jesse Krompier ’10, a member of the sketch comedy group Robber Barons (which produced each of the festival’s five comedies), for “Flame On,” a film about a boy who cannot snap, and then, suddenly, can–with some pretty “hot” consequences.

Best music video went to Chris Sonne (’09) for his impressively well-rhymed and comprehensive biology-themed rap duet “Oxidate It or Love It,” which borrows beats from The Game and Jay-Z. And, thanks to its subtitled YouTube video, it has glued the lyric, “So the energy you get from eating them blueberries is ferried to where high energy electrons are carried,” to my brain.

Best screenplay and audience favorite went to Abteen Bagheri ’11 and Sam Pressman ’10 for “Cocaine Cowboys,” a prettily shot movie that garners some Terrence Malick charm early on in a scene involving a Connect Four game. Its wise-guy-tolerates-idiot dynamic pays homage to “Of Mice and Men,” but with a pinata full of cocaine driving the narrative, it comes closer to the antics of a Guy Ritchie caper, especially once Sammy Franco (’09) shows up as a cokehead on roller skates.

Best documentary went to MFA student Brian March for his concise, black-and-white PTSD-exploration entitled “Michael and His Dragon,” which honored its subject with subtlety.

Among the six other documentaries were “Bold Strydes,” about a young woman’s passion for creating African-inspired clothing; “New Crossroads,” about the cross-cultural work the a cappella group Talisman is doing in South Africa; “Art of Yoga,” which informed me that teaching yoga to female juvenile delinquents might be good for them; and “Behind the Scenes of Bad Lieutenant,” which let me bask in film-geek awe at cinematic idol Werner Herzog’s Bavarian despair.

It was clear that effort had gone into making these movies, but I found myself with some critical thoughts.

To begin, I wanted the movies to have better stories. Instead, they felt meandering, one scene going into the next without a thread to connect them. “Bold Strydes” had chronology, which will do in a pinch, but I would have liked seeing that old narrative staple–someone wanting something–put to better use.

For that, you need characters, something the movies seemed short on. I liked “Powow Stories 2010” best when it was interviewing a jewelry vendor who supported himself and his family with handcrafted turquoise necklaces. “Oh no,” I thought, “what’s he going to do?” Maybe this sounds like schadenfreude at worst and voyeurism at best, but I’d prefer to call it empathy.

Other films seemed a bit too promotional, ignoring the more complex sides of their subjects. “New Crossroads,” for example, focused exclusively on the positive interactions between Stanford students and their South African hosts. I wondered if there were moments of less-than-ideal rapport, or times when the students questioned the value of their endeavor. “Art of Yoga,” too, missed a chance to complicate its story with questions about the program–what fiscal trade-offs it involved, for example, or whether yoga actually helped the girls lead better lives. A documentary needn’t be antagonistic to display depth, but neither should it be credulous. My favorite stories are ones where I don’t know exactly how to feel about what I’m seeing.

I’m holding these films to a high standard, I know. I made a documentary for a class once, and the result was something I didn’t even bother to save from deletion. I know that as students we have limited time, budgets and experience–and that makes putting a great film together really hard. But I’m not convinced it’s impossible. I believe a really good movie is literally among the best things that can exist, so why be content with anything else?