Students in the Experimental College class "Producing Films for Social Change" will show their final projects Tuesday night at a screening in Cabot's ASEAN Auditorium at 6 p.m.. The documentaries all aim to show the bigger picture.
The screening will be run like the Cannes Film Festival, with the filmmakers and some of the cast from each project participating in a question and answer session with the audience.
Now in its seventh semester, "Producing Films" has been an important class for the department. Julie Dobrow, director of the Communications and Media Studies Program, believes that "it has wed together the notion that films can be used for social change. It has brought a lot of people who might not otherwise have taken a class with a direct theme of civic engagement together.
We've had people who are humanities and social science majors, engineers, Fletcher, students from the Museum School - truly students from across the university."
According to Dobrow, the films made in this class have been implemented in a varieity of real-world causes, including use by the "Rhode Island State Legislature to try to toughen up drunk driving laws, used by non-profit groups to draw attention to their causes, shown before a large meeting of the EPA, and screened at film festivals," Dobrow said.
Taught by Margaret Lazarus and co-instructor Don Schechter (LA '01), the class was a crash course in documentary production. Until this semester, the class was taught by senior lecturer Roberta Oster Sachs.
"Margaret Lazarus comes from a different background than the previous 'Producing Films' teacher [senior lecturer Roberta Oster Sachs] and brings different types of filmmaking ideas," said junior Michael Taub, a student in the class. A social activist filmmaker, Lazarus won the 1993 Academy Award for Best Short Documentary Film for "Defending Our Lives." Other films of hers document topics relating to social justice, such as domestic violence, trauma and recovery, the media, political history, United States international policy, rape and health.
Teaching Assistant and Tufts junior Rodrigo Armstrong, who took the class with Oster Sachs, also noted some changes in teaching style resulting from the two instructors' different backgrounds. "Instead of looking at news pieces this semester, the students studied award-winning documentaries," said Armstrong via an e-mail. "As a result, the projects had a bit more freedom in terms of techniques, instead of using the ... more restricting news format."
The 15 students created four short films: "Legal 21" by junior Ari Allen, sophomore Evan Chenoweth, sophomore Fielding Pagel and freshman Sarah Ullman; "Making Contact: The Somerville Boxing Club" by senior Allegra Anderson, sophomore Marisa Jones, sophomore Moshe Netter and senior Tricia O'Neill; "Stuttering: Not Bound By Words" by senior Tim Huang, junior Michael Taub and senior Stefanie Tiso; and "Out-Dated: Exploring the Campus Hook-Up Culture" by sophomore Christine Attura, freshman Allen Irwin, freshman Julia Mitarotondo and sophomore Sara Sorcher.
"The work was extremely gratifying," Taub said. "We each now have a movie that we've invested a lot of work into and that we all can be proud of. We learned that anyone can make a meaningful film if they're willing to put in some commitment."
The screening is co-sponsored by the Tisch College for Citizenship and Public Service, the Communications and Media Studies program and the Media and Public Service Program, as well as the ExCollege.
- Leticia Frazao
