BLUE

“We didn’t start the fire, no we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.” -Billy Joel

Ever since the invention of the camera, people have marveled at the ability to frame images, freezing a moment in time; we have a magical ability to absorb the light around us and project it onto a screen. This rebirth of a moment evokes questions that would otherwise not be asked: did this moment matter? Does it reveal bigger truths? In these chaotic times, the art that we make is writing our cultural history. I want to freeze this state of American society, politics and culture in a documentary film. My feelings of disillusionment and disarray have inspired me to pursue an interdisciplinary film thesis with the Peace and Justice Studies department tracking the immediate future of the 2020 graduate class. 

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Days before we left campus in the spring of 2020, our art professor stumbled upon my friends and me crying and holding each other in Jewett. She explained to us that this sudden onset of chaos was trauma, but that trauma fed artists. I came into Wellesley as a member of the class of 2020, but I am lucky to have one more semester left because I previously took a leave to pursue a film and journalism internship. Leaving Wellesley with one foot in and one foot out of the 2020 class left my heart in pieces––pieces of cultural memory and zeitgeist, with which I intend to create a mosaic. Following six students as case studies, I will make a travel documentary split between Zoom interviews and in-person, portrait encounters with recent graduates.

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After the 2016 election in our first semester at Wellesley, our college experience has been a political turmoil. On the one hand, the country’s administration became more extreme in its far-right authoritarianism. On the other, my peers believed in freedom and equal opportunities. Born into a post- 9/11 and Cold War era,  they were too young to remember the actual events. Instead, they were left with the ideological repercussions: racialized bias, far-right extremism, and a broken heart. All hoped for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Cue the last semester of the 2020 graduating class, and my best friends were graduating before their time; COVID-19 started flooding our newsfeeds and within a week we were scattered across borders and continents. Some wanted to leave, others were devastated. It wasn’t supposed to end like this, no, but I will meet you again, I hope, no I know. Yes, I know. 

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The journey of the 2020 class post-graduation is unpredictable, unstable and utterly terrifying. Countless summer internships and job prospects have already been cancelled. Regardless of their political affiliation, most of these graduates do not trust the government to care for them. Are they capable of being reborn at the forefront of an economic recession, what the New York Times named the largest American protest movement yet and a mismanaged global pandemic? Their journey in the aftermath of their graduation will speak to the state of American society.

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As a Peace and Justice and Cinema and Media Studies double major, I am perfectly suited to complete this project. Classes including Intermediate Cinema Theory and Advanced Video Production have helped to expand my knowledge of theoretical analysis and film production, while Intermediate Peace and Conflict Theory and the India Wintersession helped me gain better listening strategies and experience in travel journalism. Furthermore, in the Spring of 2019, I took an independent study with Professor Wini Wood on documentary film in order to help prepare for my thesis. I studied the general history of nonfiction film and gained more experience in production, which culminated in a short essay film about my personal sense of cultural fragmentation. I hope that you will review my online video portfolio here, where you will also find a section pertaining to work that I have already done for my thesis.

Finally, I took the 360 Peace and Justice thesis class in the spring of 2020, within which I have studied documentary filmmaking through a  cinematic, social and theoretical lens. Since leaving school, I have been meeting my advisor, Professor Larry Rosenwald, over Zoom to continue preparing. Head of the school’s Peace and Justice Studies department and my thesis advisor, he has been teaching at Wellesley for almost 40 years. As a recent Guggenheim fellow specializing in the intersection between literature and conflict transformation, he encapsulates my vision of combining art and social justice.

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I will be taking a leave of absence in the Fall of 2020 to complete my project. Since leaving Wellesley, I have been consistently recording Zoom interviews with the six aforementioned graduates. If it is safe to do so, I plan to visit all of them individually within the next few months in order to gather in-person interviews as well. With the help of Professor Rosenwald and Professor Claudia Joskowicz––the film production professor in the Studio Arts department––I plan to edit the entire film in the spring of 2021. I will release a full feature documentary in time for the Ruhlman Conference. 

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By pursuing this project, I am creating an ode to the collective trauma that the 2020 graduating class is experiencing. I am lucky that I have not yet graduated and that I will continue to enjoy Wellesley for another semester, but I will not settle for being the lucky one of my Red peers; I stand in solidarity with my class. This project is my commitment to my community and peers. I will happily work as the medium to tell their story: the middle ground between their reality and the rest of the world, the pen to their broken words. I can never know how they feel, but my unique positionality allows me to peek into their hearts and tell a sliver of their stories.

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The six individuals that I have chosen are truly children of our social revolution. These students are 2020 graduates of Wellesley College and some of the most incredible people I will ever meet: an environmental scientist, a human rights lawyer, a screenwriter, a cyberpunk artist and sociologist, a leader of a labor union and a software engineer. I do not know whether these people will be able to follow their dreams. Where will they end up--with a job, at home, back at school? By following their paths, I can reveal the faults and strengths of modern day America and whom it serves.

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As a storyteller, I am no stranger to transmitting service and engagement through film. While studying abroad in Chile, I made my first documentary interviewing Chileans and Haitian refugees about race. There, it was my knowledge of French and Spanish that allowed me to communicate with both Chileans and Haitians, gaining a unique perspective on contemporary social and political issues. In this project, it is my knowledge of a unique cultural language that gives me the perfect positionality: I am simultaneously included and excluded from their experience, separated from their graduation while living a similar chaos and instability.  

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The world is changing faster than anyone could have ever imagined, and the scope of my Zoom interviews has already grown more than I anticipated when we first left Wellesley in the spring. This project is bound to change with the times and the circumstances--this is what makes it so worthwhile. Our everyday life, especially as we become more contained to our homes, can seem stagnant and hopeless. We, however, are experiencing a unique positionality: first row seats to American history.