global-citizen-festival

At the beginning of the short film “Oleander,” the spirited teenager Oleander Jones kisses her boyfriend in the back of his pickup truck, proudly declaring, “I believe in the power of love. And by love, I mean sex, and by sex, I mean that sexual fulfillment is a fundamental right.” In a country where sexual education—particularly the continued emphasis on abstinence-only sexual education—is an increasingly contentious subject, Oleander’s unabashedly pro-sex attitude shatters norms of female sexuality.

As a child, writer and director Channing Godfrey Peoples attended the Miss Juneteenth pageant held each year in Fort Worth, Texas. Seeing beautiful black women celebrated on stage, on the holiday that commemorates when slaves in Texas learned that they had been freed in 1865, left a lasting impression on her.

She imagines her mind like a hallway. Boxes line the floor, filled with all of the poetry and artwork she has ever studied. James Baldwin and W.B. Yeats are there, talking to her in David Hammons' blue light.

With most classes and club meetings being held according to Columbia’s East Coast time zone, international students have been left to study or find community during the wee hours of the night. Most first-years and transfers haven’t even had the opportunity to explore campus or experience college life in daylight.

This semester, with students away from campus due to COVID-19 health and safety restrictions, many are no longer able to access Columbia’s libraries and other resources in person. In response, the University has made plans to accommodate international students through its Columbia Global Centers—traditionally international research outposts—which now provide an option for students who need a safe, communal working space outside of their homes.

Columbia Int Fic has found a solution to the isolation of social distancing—specifically, through an art form called interactive fiction. Ideal for an online format, interactive fiction allows readers to engage with stories by making decisions for the protagonist, similar to “choose your own adventure” books.

Amid this year of many changes, another was announced to Columbia’s undergraduate class of 2024: “Citizen: An American Lyric,” by Claudia Rankine, SoA ’93, has been added to the Literature Humanities summer reading list.

The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” lyrics light up the bottom of the screen. Shadow puppets pack a suitcase. Johann Strauss takes over for Vera Lynn in a Doctor Strangelove-inspired closing montage. Sprawled across YouTube, Facebook, and Zoom, this is interdisciplinary theater at its most inventive.

As an art form, theater is defined by hands-on collaboration, the thrill of live performance, and the real-time connections that audiences forge with the actors and the story onstage. None of those defining elements of theater seem feasible in the age of social distancing. Still, Columbia and Barnard’s theater department faculty never considered canceling the senior thesis festival for directing students.

Harvey Weinstein, the film mogul whose patterns of sexual harassment and assault have been a public secret in the industry, was recently convicted of rape by a jury of seven men and five women in the New York Supreme Court. At the Athena Film Festival on Saturday, a panel of “silence breakers” in the entertainment industry reacted to the outcome that they called “unfathomable” and spoke about the work they’ve done to shift the culture—emphasizing how much work we have yet to do.