Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[ Music ]
>> Student: Our film, "Pasa La Voz" "Spread the Word" is a film
that explores the lives of different Latina women
who either work or live with *** AIDS in the Juarez
in El Paso border town area.
>> Student: "Empowering the Yard" looks at *** prevention
from the perspective of five incarcerated women
who are using peer education as a tool for empowerment
for themselves, their families, and their communities.
>> Student: Our movie is about empowering women who are *** positive.
>> Student: Parent-child communication on the issues of *** health.
>> Student: Our film is about a diverse community
of street-based survival sex workers in D.C. and some
of the barriers they face and their personal triuphms.
>> Steven Ujlaki: At San Francisco State
with a very strong documentary tradition,
and with a very strong sense of social consciousness,
I can't think of a better place in which to train students
to actually develop areas of expertise dealing
with social and health matters.
It's a kind of course that I always tell people
about when they say, "Well,
what do you do there that's especially different or,
or unique?," and I say, well, this is what we do.
>> Dr. Mary Beth Love: Students learn and things go into long-term memory
when you present information in such a way
that it not only has an intellectual charge,
but that it has an emotional appeal.
And film is a very good way to both present research
and information, but then to make that research real -
>> Prof. Rachel Poulain: The class is an inter-disciplinary class
where we bring cinema students and health education students
or students from other departments together.
They form teams.
They then partner with a community-based organization
and spend one to two semesters working with that organization
to create a film that they can then use to educate
and advocate for change.
>> Dr. Cynthia Gomez: So the Health Equity Initiative was created
by San Francisco State University as one
of the outcomes of its dedication
to equity and social justice.
Our role is to actually locate the talent on campus
to address health inequities.
We locate that talent through faculty, through staff,
through students, and try to synergize that talent
into creating real solutions.
>> Prof: Greta Snider: So this year, our production course collaborated
with the National AIDS Fund.
Teams of our students traveled to Tulsa, Miami, Washington,
D.C., New Orleans, and the El Paso-Juarez area working
with local service providers to research and then design, shoot,
edit, and produce short films on women and ***.
>> Dr. Kandy Ferree: I think, you know, the biggest concern that I had going
into it was, you know, did we have the capacity
to really pull this off in five different sites.
You know, this is the first time that we've done it.
So there's always anxiety, I think,
when you're doing a project for the first time.
You've not collaborated with folks.
I think other things were, you know, was the group
of students going to be able to really get it.
Were they going to be able to learn enough quickly enough
about ***, the nuances of the issue,
and then also the social justice aspects of it.
>> Student: I was just surprised how emotionally involved I was
throughout the entire process of making this film.
>> Student: I was surprised to see how much *** still affects women.
>> Still: I was surprised by the connection that I found
with the women who I interviewed in prison coming
from really different backgrounds.
I wasn't looking for that kind of connection,
but I found it, and it was powerful.
>> Student: I was surprised by how deep the interviewees talked
about their personal lives with us, being total strangers.
>> Students: I was surprised by how dedicated these women are
to what they're doing, and how they're trying
to change their little part of the world.
>> Student: I didn't realize that there was
so much stigma attached to AIDS.
>> Dr. Kandy Ferree: The stories are incredible.
I can't believe that you were able to get that kind of detail
and emotion from women that you've never met before.
I think it was remarkable.
>> Dr. Kandy Ferree: The great thing about it is that all of our fears
or concerns had been completely melted away.
The students have been amazing.
Clearly, the professors prepared them appropriately.
The pairing of health education students
and cinematography students I think is a wonderful balance
because it also teaches both of them about other issues.
As I was talking to one of the young men today, you know,
he said I had so many preconceived, you know,
notions about what working with these populations was going
to be about, I didn't know anything about ***.
You know, we had that first lecture from Dr. Gomez,
and we were all completely overwhelmed, but now I get it.
>> Prof. Greta Snider: For me, this course is showing a lot students,
as well as the community, ways in which they can,
can find a place in public dialogue
and have their issues find a place in public dialogue.
>> Dr. Cynthia Gomez: This course is also about having a historical set of films
over time that highlight the issues of the day, if you will.
And so as years go by, ten years from now we look back
at this series, and ask ourselves,
"wow, have things changed?"
"Are they still the same?"
"Have we moved?"
So they become, in some ways, the barometer
for achieving our own goals in health equity.
>> [background talk] I want,
a couple of things, like, when you -
>> Dr. Kandy Ferree: It's been such a huge educational experience
for the students and for us.
I mean, that's a win-win all around.
If we come out with compelling social justice documentaries
around women and ***, and students have learned something,
and at the end of the day they take not just this product,
but the learning that they've gotten from this process back
into their other classes, into their communities,
[music] into their families, then we've accomplished far more
than we could have ever dreamed of.
>> Student: I learned how to use film as a tool for social justice.
>> Student: In this class, I learned about the power of an art form
like documentary film to convey a message of social justice
that can't always be conveyed in academia.
>> Student: I learned how much women are affected by ***,
in particular women of color.
>> Student: I learned how *** is prevalent in all communities
and affecting everybody.
>> Student: I learned how to work in group, how to work on a team
and create something really great and, and exciting
and that help the community.
[ Music ]