Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
In its first year as an academic program, members of the consortial Documentary Storymaking minor were invited to attend the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. This minor is a collaborative venture created by Muhlenberg College, Lehigh University, and Lafayette College, and sponsored by the Lehigh Valley Association for Independent Colleges (LVAIC). Students and faculty from the Documentary Minor course, DOC 480: Docs in Progress, traveled to Durham, North Carolina on Thursday, April 6th to participate in the four-day festival event.
Full Frame is one of the nation’s premiere film festivals dedicated to the best work in documentary filmmaking from around the world. The event is attended annually by world-class documentary filmmakers, academics, and festival programmers. Each year, the Full Frame Film Festival invites a select group of colleges and universities to participate in the “Full Frame Fellows Program.” This year, only 15 programs nationwide were selected to participate in the program. The LVAIC Documentary Storymaking minor was among programs from a number of schools across the country, including NYU, Stanford, Duke, Elon, and UCLA.
As part of the Fellows program, the students were given complete access to all of the film screenings at the festival throughout the weekend. They also participated in a number of panel discussions with industry leaders and attended a variety of master classes and other private events with established documentary filmmakers. Given the Media & Communication’s department roots in the ethics of representation and its reliance on the course text, Robert Coles’ “Doing Documentary Work,” the group also toured the Center for Documentary Studies.
Muhlenberg students in attendance included Emmia Newman, Drew Swedberg, Sherry Rodriguez, and Maggie Zerbe. Claudia Rodriguez of Lafayette College and Ashley Omoma of Lehigh University, both of whom are students in the Docs in Progress course, were also participants in the Fellows program. The students were accompanied by three Documentary Storymaking faculty advisors including Instructional Design Consultant, Jenna Azar, Assistant Professor of Media & Communication, Aggie Bazaz of Muhlenberg College, and Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies, Nandini Sikand of Lafayette College.
The Full Frame Fellows program gave these select students a tremendous opportunity to connect their learning in the classroom to documentary work in the outside world, all while being immersed in a professional yet creative environment.
Senior Maggie Zerbe observed that “the films at Full Frame not only allowed me to think creatively about modes of production, but also issues of ethics and representation--two key areas that were discussed heavily in my Documentary Research course.”
Members of the LVAIC Documentary Storymaking minor want to acknowledge that participation in the Fellows program could not have been possible without their partnering organization, the Social Justice Collaborative, as well as the following sponsors: The Department of Media and Communication, Film Studies, Student Government, the Associate Dean’s Office for Digital Learning, the Dean’s Office of Academic Life at Muhlenberg College, as well as Lehigh University, Lafayette College, and LVAIC.
--Article written by Alyssa Kratz
