U.N.'s Global Youth Cinema to Be Part of Curriculum
The Hamptons International Film Festival has partnered this year with the United Nations and the International Organization for Migration to bring short films made by students around the world to the East Hampton screen.
Students from schools across the East End will view the films, which focus on the themes of migration, diversity, and social inclusion, at the end of next week, providing fodder for discussion and ongoing school activities that will help local youngsters under- stand and grapple with those issues.
The films, in many languages but subtitled in English, are among the winners selected by an international jury in the Plural + Youth Video Festival sponsored by the U.N.’s Alliance of Civilizations along with the migration organization.
The tie-in with the U.N. program was championed by Kim Brizzolara, a member of the film festival board, and was organized by Linda Biscardi, another H.I.F.F. board member and a retired East Hampton teacher who has, for every year of the festival, devised a way to mine its offerings for rich educational experiences for local students.
Diversity, acceptance, tolerance, human rights, identity and gender issues -- all of these are front and center both globally among nations and in each community, school, and classroom. After seeing how children worldwide have examined these things, the aim is to have local students make their own films around the same issues.
From the 28 winning short student films in the U.N. video contest, Ms. Biscardi created an hourlong program for seventh and eighth-grade students. The 19 films were made in various countries by students of all ages and center on a variety of topics that dovetail with the curricular themes of tolerance, inclusion, immigration, and self-esteem. Back in the classroom, the films will serve as “a springboard for discussion, reading, and writing,” Ms. Biscardi said.
Teachers and administrators at local schools were provided with copies of the films and a classroom guide prepared by Ms. Biscardi with a sample curriculum and list of discussion questions to highlight and expand on the issues touched on in the films.
For instance, one film shows the ramifications of stereotyping; the subject of immigration and “welcoming new people” is the theme of another. Another, she said, addresses the topic of “never giving up on your dreams; setting goals, no matter what obstacles are in your way.”
The curriculum guides are open-ended, so that teachers can design their own activities, tailoring them to their students and tying them in to their studies or particular situations in their schools.
Student response “is always colored by what they’ve experienced in life,” Ms. Biscardi said. Viewing the films showing how children all over the world respond to the various issues is “a way to broaden their perspectives.”
Three international students who made the film “3 Things You Should Know About My Hijab” for the U.N. film contest — Sarah Champagne, Hodan Hujaleh, and Kayf Abdulqadir, a Muslim girl — are coming to speak to local students.
The H.I.F.F. program on Friday, Oct. 9, will be for 296 high school juniors and seniors selected by their school administrators and teachers as leaders -- student government representatives, scholar-athletes, and the like — in recognition of “youth as powerful agents for social change,” according to program materials. It will include a screening of 10 films followed by a panel discussion and question-and-answer session. As of early this week, students from the Ross, East Hampton, and Pierson High Schools were slated to participate.
Panelists will include Jordi Torrent of the U.N.’s media and literary division, the film contest’s co-sponsor, and additional student filmmakers who entered the contest, including Siarrah Kane, who made “She Who Is.”
Her film, said Ms. Biscardi, “exposes stereotypes about how women are labeled.” It is a film that “encourages all young women to have a voice and be strong, and to not cave in to society’s unfair labeling of females.” Ms. Biscardi chose it to present, she said, because “I wanted that message to get out to the young girls in the audience, that this is a topic to get out to leaders in your school.”
Elizabeth Reveiz, the director of English language learning and the bilingual program at East Hampton High School and an advocate for immigrants, will also be a panelist, discussing “migration, diversity, and social inclusion,” Ms. Biscardi said. That is “another topic important to our community” because of the growing immigrant population, “and also a topic that is so current in the news.” It is “something that these juniors and seniors will need to know about as they go on to college or the armed forces, or wherever they go.”
Ms. Biscardi, who retired from teaching in 2008 after 35 years as an East Hampton English teacher in grades 7 through 12 and chairwoman of the English department, has designed and implemented at least one, and sometimes as many as five, educational programs tied to the film festival for every one of its 23 years.
She got involved as a board member at the festival’s inception. As an educator, she thought, “We have an international film festival in our backyard — how can I utilize that great resource in kids’ lives?”
The annual programs were designed “to bring the festival back into the classroom — [to be] not just a day of film,” but a way to use the festival to enhance students’ education.
The annual projects often took the title of a particular festival film that provided the theme for student activities. For “Seeds of Peace,” based on a documentary about a camp program that brings together children of different ethnicities or nationalities that are in conflict with one another, Palestinian and Israeli youngsters were invited to East Hampton to interact with local students.
“Not in Our Town,” a documentary about the response of Billings, Mont., residents to an incident of anti-Semitism (even non-Jews put menorahs in their windows), spurred the inception of East Hampton Town’s Anti-Bias Task Force, Ms. Biscardi said.
One year, Ms. Biscardi’s students wrote to the director Steven Spielberg about the work of his Shoah Foundation documenting experiences of the Holocaust and were invited to attend the premiere of “Schindler’s List.”
Local music educators got involved when “Music of the Heart,” a movie in which Meryl Streep starred as Roberta Guaspari, a teacher who got students in a Harlem school involved in playing stringed instruments, was screened. Ms. Guaspari attended and was greeted with a performance by violin players from many East End schools.
When “Colors Straight Up,” a documentary about inner-city Los Angeles students involved in studying Shakespeare, was shown, East Hampton students became their pen pals; when “Hoop Dreams” came out, varsity and junior varsity coaches viewed the film with their teams.
And so on, for every year. There was a “Children’s Lives” project piggybacking on the “Men’s Lives” documentary about East End baymen. It featured local kids whose parents fished. In other years, students made their own silent film and a film about the film festival itself.
“The Bully Project,” screened three years ago, stands out for her in the list, Ms. Biscardi said. “It was a small film that just became a nationwide movement in schools, and our district was one of the first to be involved.”
Lee Hirsch, the documentarian who made it, had the parents of a child who was “bullied to death” come to East Hampton. “Administrators, teachers, and children were crying,” said Ms. Biscardi. Anti-bullying programs prompted by that film are still ongoing in local schools.
“Whenever I see a film, I try to see how that film can touch a kid’s life in some way — how I can use that film in education,” Ms. Biscardi said. “Children learn visually very, very well, and that can stay with them — those stories. It is an incredibly rich tool for education.”
The teacher is now seeing some of her students’ names in the credits of film festival films. “It’s what I had imagined,” she said. “I don’t know that our community or the film festival knows how much it has impacted kids’ lives.”
Download the 2015 Hamptons International Film Festival program guide as a PDF.