New documentaries completed by UCF film students while they spent a few weeks in Kolkata, India will make their UCF debut at 12:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 15, at the Burnett Honors College as part of International Education Week. Film students in UCF’s Nicholson School of Communication and Media and the iLEAD Institute, a media and management college in Kolkata, produced the films as part of a summer project.
“I’m very proud of the students’ total commitment to the project,” says Phil Peters, a film professor in the Nicholson School of Communication and Media, who conceived and supervised the project. “I’m a real believer in the internationalization of students. I feel that you need to immerse students into other cultures, and the best way to immerse is to get them out of the tourist situation.”
Peters’ instructions to the students were to explore an idea, keep the idea small, but investigate it deeply.
Also on the trip and working on his own independent research project was David Morton, an instructor in the Department of History and doctoral student in the Texts and Technology program on campus.
He says Kolkata was an especially fitting place to shoot films because of the rich history of cinema in Bengal and Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal.
“Bengal has one of the oldest continuously operating film industries in all of India,” Morton says. “Before Bollywood became preeminent, Kolkata’s Parallel Cinema movement of the 1950s was a moment when Indian cinema was first projected into the outside world.”
Read the full story on UCF Today: Lady Bikers, Street Dogs and Kolkata Featured in New Films from UCF Students