Ori Evans
Unlike most students, three-year senior Ori Evans decided to apply to Exeter because of Steve Jobs. Evans, a successful filmmaker, didn’t believe he would ever go to a school other than the high school he was attending until he discovered his admiration for the Apple CEO. “I really wanted to be Steve Jobs, and do what Steve Jobs did. So I started thinking, ‘Okay, the high school I’m going to isn’t going to get me into the college that I need to get into to do what I want,’” Evans said. “So I looked up, ‘What’s the best high school in America?’ and then I saw boarding school was the best education you can get.”
"After all the over-achieving and film festival screenings are over, Ori’s still the chill dude willing to kick back and listen to KDot with you"
Evans proceeded to apply to the Exeter Summer School, get in and attend the program, where he was thrilled to be surrounded by like-minded students. Evans felt the need to continue this experience, and decided to apply to Exeter during his freshman year. Despite his surprise at his admission to the Academy, Evans fully embraced Exeter’s capacity to steer one down an unexpected path. “[Coming to Exeter] is the best decision I’ve ever made; it really is. It changed me a lot, and when I got to Exeter I realized that I didn’t want to be Steve Jobs in the occupational sense: I wanted to be a filmmaker,” he said. His original desire to become a billionaire CEO has fully morphed into an unwavering enthusiasm for filmmaking, something Evans is known for on and off campus.
For Evans, movie making began as a way to mesh his many passions. In the art of acting and filmmaking, he saw the opportunity to adopt all of the personas that interested him. “When it came to films, I wanted to be an actor as well…I also wanted to be a politician because I already had the ability to lead people and get them to listen to me,” Evans elaborated. “I wanted to be so many things, [and] it just hit me one day. I came up with the thought that, hmm, maybe if I want to be all these things, I can be these things in my movies. I can turn myself into these characters.”
In order to truly become great at filmmaking, Evans had to dedicate himself completely to learning the craft. He focused on drawing from his own life experiences to create an authentic experience. “You can’t tell a story that you don’t know,” Evans explained. “If you’ve never been in love, you can’t write a love story, and if you’ve never been shot, you can’t write a story about being shot!”
Evans was amazed to see the impact that his creations—and art in general—had on people. However, he expressed disappointment in the lack of artistic expression seen at PEA. “Art isn’t a big thing at Exeter, sadly, and art isn’t a big thing in many places,” Evans said. “ It’s the ultimate thing you can do, because you’re creating something.” Evans views art as a way to cultivate a meaningful legacy: “You have to leave something here. We’re all born knowing we’re going to die, so what are you going to do with the time you have?”
Philosophical questions like these play an important role in Evans’ work, in addition to topics such as racism and other forms of discrimination. As the creator of the Afro-Latinx Exonian Society (ALES) film of last spring—the video that accompanied the petition ALES made to Principal Lisa MacFarlane to address racial discrimination around campus—Evans was shocked in the process to learn the stories shared in the video. “I was like, ‘What the hell? Why do people have to go through this?’” Evans continued, saying, “I guess I’m lucky to have the ability to really connect with everyone, no matter what their race is, and to see from their perspective. And to have the ability to empathize, and to look at things from other people’s perspective.”
English instructor William Perdomo, Evans’ teacher and chaperone on the Spring Break trip to Cuba, identified Evans’ love of creating as a precursor to success in the classroom. “I think Ori’s pursuit of beauty as a philosophical endeavor is an inspiring and worthy engagement,” Perdomo said. “His pursuit often lends itself to creativity in the classroom, an eclectic approach to imagery and a mode of inquiry that’s productive.”
Lower Fiona Madrid, a friend of Evans and an actress in one of his films, described Ori as one of her personal inspirations. She said, “I aspire to be as sure of myself as he is. He balances his schoolwork and directing/filming perfectly, and he’s still in love with his work. How one can be more than just an Exeter student? Only he knows.”
Senior Cameron Najafi, Evans’ dorm mate and fellow film producer, characterized Evans’ spirit and enthusiasm for films as infectious. “Ori really inspires me,” Najafi said. “I see him working late into the night on his films, printing and taping his favorite movie stills to his wall, geeking out about new equipment—he lives and breathes film, and it’s great to be by that energy.”
Evans and Najafi worked on “Mourning Dove,” a film that was entered in Phillips Academy Andover’s film festival and was nominated for several awards. The film follows a teenage girl through the early hours of the morning. Lower Beez Dentzer, the actress in “Mourning Dove,” admires Evans talent and passion in the hardest of filming situations. “He is attentive to detail, has masterful command of the camera and an incredible eye for storytelling. Ori is always fun to be with even when shooting in the rain, on an impossible deadline, mid-week, before the sun is up,” she said.
Evans’ filmmaking role model is director Christopher Nolan. “Really in all his films, he always twists them—you have ‘The Prestige,’ ‘Memento,’ ‘The Dark Knight Trilogy,’ ‘Inception,’ ‘Dunkirk,’” Evans said. “I’m not even into war movies! But because [‘Dunkirk’] had Christopher Nolan’s name, I went to go watch it. It was easily one of the best films I’ve ever seen.”
However, Evans’ main source of inspiration is activist Malcolm X. “He keeps that fight in me,” Evans explained. Evans went on to describe how Malcolm X’s philosophy forces him to remain self-aware: “I’ve gotta remember every day that, when I wake up—as privileged as I am to live the way I live—I am a black man and I have to go about the world in that way, regardless of how creative I am and what I do, whatever I make at the end of the day doesn’t matter. Irrationality is my pet peeve—and racism is very irrational.”
Another form of discrimination that has captivated Evans’ attention is that associated with gender identity and sexual orientation. The research he did last year with the Center for Study of Boys and Girls’ Lives (CSBGL) originally sparked Evans’ interest in the topics of gender identity. When he returns in the winter, Evans will be living in the newly-created all-gender dorm, “and that’s going to be a hoot,” he said. “It’s going to be a really good experience to have—understanding how different people live, and being immersed in that community..”
Biology Instructor Michele Chapman, Evans’ advisor, praised his role in his former dorm, Knight House. Describing Evans’ enthusiasm to interact with his dorm mates, she said,“Ori connected well with other students in the dorm. He incorporated the boys into his films as actors and co-creators.” In general, Chapman felt as though her advisee’s impact on campus was widespread. “Everyone seems to know him, either from his work with ALES, assemblies he has spoken in, his involvement in sports and as a tour guide and, of course, his films,” Chapman said. “We’ll miss him around here in the fall while he’s away in Japan, but I suspect that this winter we’ll see him back out on campus, making an impact.”
Despite his many accolades and achievements, Evans remains a humble friend to many, including senior Nick Song. “After all the over-achieving and film festival screenings are over, Ori’s still the chill dude willing to kick back and listen to KDot with you,” Song said. “It’s hard to articulate how lucky we are to have him on campus.”