Short

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a worthy test of our bonds with loved ones. Even though some of us have been split up and pulled to opposite ends of the earth, Columbia and Barnard students have proven that our relationships can withstand the toughest trials.

Director, writer, editor, photographer, first-generation college student, music lover, Instagrammer, daughter, storyteller. Just like her, the films Mariah Barrera, CC ’24, creates cannot be pigeonholed. They explore everything from the devastation of incarceration to the lighthearted simplicity of teenage joy.

The Athena Film Festival, in partnership with the Sloate Media Center at Barnard College, screened three short films written and directed by current and former Barnard students as part of the “Student Short Film Showcase.” Held at the Glicker-Milstein Black Box Theatre on Feb. 28 student filmmakers Hannah Ahn, BC ’19, Emma Noelle Buhain, BC ’20, and Iris Sang, BC ’21, had their films screened for a full audience. Ahn and Buhain also joined postbaccalaureate fellows Ruby Mastrodimos and Kory Louko on a panel following the screening.

This afternoon, The New York Times published Jordana Narin's, CC '17, essay, "No Labels, No Drama, Right?" which won the Modern Love College Essay Contest this year. Congrats, Jordana!

Wow! Spring Break is already upon us. Time flies pretty quickly when you're buried under a pile of textbooks having fun, and what more fun can you ask for on this week off then reading some books (you definitely don't want to watch any movies).

Walking on water, healing the blind, and finding a job? Jesus has a lot on his plate in the student short film "The New Testament," which makes it debut Wednesday at 9 p.m. at the Anthology Film Archives on Second Avenue. Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, the twenty minute short film transplants a young Jesus Christ to modern-day New York, where he struggles with the challenges of twenty-something life. "He encounters a few buddies and a few enemies along the way, goes on a date with Mary Magdalene, Satan tempts him with three jobs," said Eric Ingram, CC '14, who both directed and starred in "The New Testament." "Christ looks for a job, and all he can find is unpaid internships."

If the name Junot Díaz doesn't make your inner bookworm swoon, by now, it should at least be familiar. His novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and collections of short stories Drown and This Is How You Lose Her have taken the literary world by storm. As if his achievements in literature weren't enough—he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008 and is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow—he's also a professor at MIT and fiction editor at the Boston Review. This week, he talked to Dunni Oduyemi about the immigrant experience, the relationship between fiction and history, and what he wishes he'd learned in college.

 One summer's end, we watched the blue land crabs escape to the water. "There is no fun involved," you said. "When the moon is full and groundwater rises, the crabs march for the spawning waters, these roads dark and unknown at night. Mating season, for several days, passes in this way."