Caroline Friend’s journey to becoming the winner of the Student Voices Short Film Contest first began two years ago – when she entered the contest and lost.

That didn’t deter her from entering again this year, and her dedication paid off. The jury awarded her film Helen Lewis: A Survivor’s Story first place for the 2015 competition, putting Friend well on her way to her goal of becoming a historical filmmaker.

Each year, Student Voices encourages students of all majors at USC to create short films incorporating testimony from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. The winners are chosen by a panel of judges that include faculty from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, filmmakers, and genocide experts. This year, Student Voices was led by DEFY, USC Shoah Foundation’s student association, and was conducted via IWitness, USC Shoah Foundation’s interactive educational website. The jury included USC School of Cinematic Arts faculty Michael Renov, Doe Mayer and Holly Willis, previous Student Voices winner Greg Irwin, and Carla Garapedian from the Armenian Film Foundation.

Friend is a junior double major in film production and history who actually interned in USC Shoah Foundation’s education department her freshman and sophomore years, after learning about the Institute from the Schindler’s List DVD. Her first foray into Student Voices two years ago was inspired by her love of historical films and documentaries, and while she didn’t win, the experience taught her a lot about how to choose which testimonies to focus on and how to make a 5-10 minute film compelling.

“I knew going in I wanted to focus on one person’s testimony and bring that to the screen. [The first time] I think I was trying to say too much,” Friend said. “That’s the hardest thing about this. You have 52,000 testimonies and they’re all [two to three] hours long and they’re all so compelling. You’re just sitting there saying, ‘I want to say all of this.’”

Friend knew she wanted to enter the contest for a second time months before the application opened, so she spent extra time watching testimony to decide which to include in her film. After searching through the Visual History Archive with various keywords, including “performing arts” and “visual arts,” Friend landed on the testimony of Helen Lewis, who was training as a ballet dancer in Prague when World War II began and she was sent to Auschwitz.

In her testimony, Lewis describes how dance literally saved her life when she was chosen to perform in a Christmas show for the SS guards at a forced labor camp. She was excused from work and given extra food so that she could rehearse and perform, which kept her alive until liberation.

The hardest part of working with Lewis’s testimony was deciding what to include in the film and what to leave out, Friend said. The testimony was incredibly compelling and Lewis had a fascinating life, but Friend wanted to focus her film on one specific aspect of it – how dance saved her life.

“It was amazing to sit there and listen to everything she was saying and how she came to terms with [her past] and was willing to share it and never had pity for herself,” Friend said. “She was sharing it because she wanted to educate people. That was really unique and interesting.”

Friend cast her younger sister Hannah, who happens to be a dancer, as Lewis. Friend showed her the testimony and explained its themes and Hannah choreographed the dancing herself. By showing the character of Lewis dancing both in the setting of Auschwitz and in a ballet studio, Friend wanted to visually represent how dancing made Lewis feel when she was fighting to stay alive.

“One of the most powerful statements was when she was dancing in the concentration camp even though she was so starving, so much in despair, when she started to dance it all melts away,” Friend said. “It was such a powerful statement and once I heard that I wanted to make that a big piece of the movie.”

The fact that Lewis’s story is just one small part of one testimony in the Visual History Archive shows how vast and eye-opening the archive is, Friend said. Lewis’s testimony taught her about having a positive outlook on life, forgiveness and moving on even in terrible situations. And, by making her film, she realized how much she could accomplish even on a limited budget and with a short time frame.

“It definitely shows you don’t need much to go out and try different things and be creative and you can still honor the testimony,” Friend said.