On Friday evening I drove up to idyllic Elsah, Ill., on the Great River Road between Alton and Grafton, to judge a student filmmakers contest at Principia College.

I knew that Principia was where the actor Robert Duvall went to school and that it was a Christian Science institution affiliated with the Principia high school in St. Louis. But other than that, I didn’t know what I was getting into.

I assumed I was going to see what I usually see in student films: simulated violence, vignettes about getting high, and parodies of the popular movies on which the young directors were weaned, from “Raiders” to “Pulp Fiction.”

When I arrived on the lovely hilltop campus and met Gameli Anumu, the film-club member who had invited me to participate, he told me that there were about 400 students at the college and that the aspiring filmmakers were trying to create a curriculum from scratch. I advised him and his friends to attend the upcoming St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase and to pay particular attention to the quality films coming out of Webster University. That’s the alma mater of Brian Jun, whose working-class drama “Steel City” was filmed in Alton in 2004, accepted at Sundance in 2006 and released on DVD last month.

“You never know,” I said.

It turns I was the one who didn’t know. The eleven short films I saw at Principia were refreshingly free of posturing and parody. There was barely a hint of violence or sexuality, and although there was a documentary about an anti-war protest in Chicago, there was also one that honored some soldiers in boot camp.

Several of the films employed stop-motion animation to charming effect. One of the student organizers told me that most of the filmmakers came from a fine-arts background rather than drama or journalism, and this was reflected in the movies. The one that I picked as my favorite was called “Tree Dance,” a nearly abstract depiction of some students climbing a Japanese maple, their limbs linking and morphing with the branches (to the music of the Thievery Corporation’s trip-hop tune “Lebanese Blonde”).

The audience-choice award went to Anumu’s humorous claymation short “Polar Bear vs. Global Warming.” Spoiler alert: The bear wins.

As I drove home in a rain storm, I felt like big-city cynicism had been washed away.