November 19, 2007

The Stanford Film Lab is a faculty-student group supported by the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) and the Hume Writing Center (HWC). Primarily focused on undergraduate research, multimedia literacy, community outreach, interdisciplinarity, and collaboration, the Film Lab aims to help students explore and conceptualize documentary projects.

Last year saw the Film Lab’s first student documentary film festival. The featured films grew out of projects developed for PWR 2, Stanford’s sophomore-level required course emphasizing oral and multimedia presentations of research-based arguments; the films covered a range of topics, including Scientology and popular culture, homosexuality and Catholicism among the Stanford student population, Facebook and campus life, online gambling and college students, and more. This year, The Film Lab plans to organize its second student documentary film festival.

The Film Lab helps build a sense of community joining PWR, the HWC, and other departments and programs on campus by hosting Film Lab events that have broad, interdisciplinary appeal. In addition to the student film festival, The Film Lab also hosts symposiums and screenings.

According to Kristi Wilson, director of The Film Lab, the Lab has been a place where students can show their work as part of the student film festival and where students can meet PWR and other faculty who work on documentary film. PWR instructor Cheryl Greene and Wilson have both hosted talks and screenings in The Film Lab. Cheryl Greene screened the 1963 short documentary The House is Black by Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad and discussed the film with audiences. Similarly, Kristi Wilson offered a short lecture entitled “Documenting Race in the U.S. from a Foreign Perspective,” which accompanied a screening of some of the short documentaries of Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez.

In addition to promoting multimedia literacy, contact between PWR students and their faculty who work on documentary film, and the growth of PWR research work in the context of documentary film, The Film Lab will continue to sponsor events that bring students together with filmmakers and local film production companies.