Parisian Phoenix Publishing

Last night Eva Parry and I attended the public screening of Lafayette College‘s DOC 250, a class on documentary filmmaking that is part of the college’s Film and Media Studies program.

The course has one of the longest descriptions in the FAMS catalog:

DOC 250/Documentary Storymaking Bridge places students’ original documentary projects at the center of the class. The metaphor of a bridge links us to Documentary Storymaking theoretical discourses, research practices, and creative production, as well as to ethically-minded documentary connections and partnerships in the community. The course is a meaningful bridge to larger projects for those students working toward a senior capstone or toward the next step after college, and offers support for complex media projects that are too large to fit into one class or one semester—integrating students’ foundational work in media making with the advanced work to come. Designed for students working above the introductory level, projects will evolve within a context of essential engagement with the study and practice of documentary rights and responsibilities.

Our young poet, McKenna Graf, debuted her short film about her grandfather at the event, with eight other Lafayette filmmakers creating works that spanned from 10 to 15 minutes. McKenna‘s second poetry chapbook, Mortals, Myths and Maybes, will release June 21 with our help. (I say our help because McKenna published her first book, writing over the world limit last spring. She’s a creative powerhouse working to immortalize so much of her experience and her view of the world.)

Among the nine projects viewed last night–ranging in theme from reclaiming movement from white colonialism to commentary on the prison system to this spring’s solar eclipse– my favorites dealt with themes revolving around discovering aspects of the self. The projects presented that showcased these personal themes had a crispness and clarity that some of the others lacked.

I think, for student filmmakers, a strong personal connection yielded a strong focus both figuratively and literally. For McKenna, her yearning to know more about her grandfather, whom she lost at a young age, allowed her to capture the emotion her extended family felt about their patriarch. It ended up being so much more than biography. In fact, we don’t learn much about him, what we learn is the impact he had on those closest to him.

For two of the other filmmakers, personal themes also provided a strong direction for their documentaries. Michael Gervase shared his adoption story in From Vietnam with Love. And his family’s cat totally tried to steal the show. But by the end of the film, which carried a thread of dealing with immigration issues as part of an international adoption, the viewer learned so much about his family and could see the love in that home. I just wanted to hug everybody!

But by far, the unexpected gem of the evening was a film by Uma Surampudi, who “accidentally” took DOC 250 as a government and law major with an anthropology and sociology minor. She claims she had every intention of dropping the class when, on the first day, she discovered it involved making a documentary. But her classmates and her instructor asked her to stay.

Her documentary chronicles how she learned to make a documentary with the help of her peers. Her vulnerability and her sense of humor while sharing her mistakes and her growth make the piece not only hysterical, which it is, but also heartwarming, as the viewer sees how the dedicated student filmmakers take her under their wing.

So, Eva (who is a B.S. psychology major at Lafayette) had a great time at this event. And it led to more musing than I expected.

It serves as a great reminder that no matter your storytelling medium, it’s your authenticity and your personal connection that makes a finished product work.

PS–

To McKenna or any of the other filmmakers: Please feel free to share links to your videos in the comments.