Now in its fifth year, the collaboration between Loyola Marymount University and the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival (LAGFF) continues to provide extensive professional development opportunities for Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts and School of Film and Television students.
BCLA Professor of Classics and Archaeology Katerina Zacharia has served as the LAGFF Director of Education since 2015 and is responsible for initiating the partnership between LMU and LAGFF. Under her leadership the program has grown from one internship in 2014 to 19 students who are involved this year.
LMU faculty and student involvement with LAGFF continues to expand. Seven SFTV faculty members have served as LAGFF jurors over the three years. LMU has also hosted multiple LAGFF screenings both on-campus and across town at UCLA. Through Professor Zacharias’s Classics and Archaeology course, “Representations of Greece: Ancient and Modern,” students of all majors are invited to work as student-interns watching LAGFF film submissions, conducting research and interviews with film directors, and writing blogs.
Students enrolled in the new “Greek Film Festival Internship” course assist with social media, IMDB entries, box office, hospitality, portfolios for The International Project Discovery Forum (IPDF), the Orpheus awards, and outreach. Additionally, BCLA now awards summer fellowships to students wishing to extend their internships to cover the period of the film festival to mid-June.
Students continue to benefit from their LAGFF experiences even after completing their internships. This past April, Arianna Ling presented her work at the Classics and Archaeology Symposium. André Enriquez’s research blog was published in the English Department’s 2018 Criterion Journal of Literary Criticism. Enriquez also did an on-stage interview with Dimitris Kitsos, who was featured in one of the films Enriquez critiqued on his blog. Three film production majors filmed festival highlights and then were invited to screen their reels at the closing awards ceremony.
The LMU-LAGFF collaboration has exciting plans for the future, which include the continuation of the “Greek Film Festival Internship” course, now being offered each semester, and potential for a student-run “Best of LAGFF at the LMU Film School” festival in fall 2019.
The “Representations of Greece: Ancient and Modern” and “Greek Film Festival Internship” courses are just a couple of the classes that make up BCLA’s ever expanding list of engaged learning courses providing hands-on internship opportunities for students.
Examples of LAGFF Student Blogs:
2018 LMU-LAGFF Student Blogs
2017 LMU-LAGFF Student Blogs
2016 LMU-LAGFF Student Blogs
