News & Events
Film by Three City Tech Students to Be Featured at University of Hawaii Conference
Three City Tech entertainment technology students — Kumi Ishizawa, Tiamara Minott and Sissy L. Villamar — worked with other students from Columbia University and New York Institute of Technology on the production of a documentary on diversity that will be featured at a University of Hawaii at Manoa conference on April 24, 2009. The three City Tech students held the key positions of co-producer, sound designer, sound editor and camera operator,among others, during the filming and production of Encountering the Multicultural City: Astoria, Queens, NYC.
The film is a short video documentary about the Astoria, Queens community, that explores how Astoria is shaped by its residents and workers and how the neighborhood, in turn, shapes them. The theme of encounter serves to sensitize the viewer to how place is made through space and time. Encountering the Multicultural City captures revealing encounters between people, between people and their environment, and between memory and materiality. It presents Astoria through encountering diverse sounds, others, new choices, new tastes and community. The video seeks to show how the multicultural city is made through multiple pathways and how both people define place and place defines people.
The film is one of several to be featured at a Diversity in Place Project conference on Making Documentaries on the Multicultural City. More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, and the urban share of the globe will continue to increase dramatically and reach 70 percent by 2050. Migration, both from within and among societies, is a major source of urbanization, with multicultural cities on the rise everywhere. The project encourages the use of documentaries to show the daily practices of multiculturalism in cities and how such films can make major contributions to research, teaching and action. They can reveal “invisible” minority cultures in a way that no other media can.
The conference is co-sponsored by the University of Hawaii’s Student Equity, Excellence and Diversity Initiative, Globalization Research Center and Department of Urban and Regional Planning. The aim of the conference is to enable students, faculty and other participants to share and develop skills in filmmaking as a qualitative method for teaching and research on multiculturalism and place-making. The event will include other presenters of videos and discussions of skills and applications of video as one of the most ideal formats through which people can understand their relations with place as a dimension of social and cultural diversity.
“The entire Department of Entertainment Technology is very proud of Kumi, Tiamara and Sissy,” says Entertainment Technology Professor John Huntington, “on the quality of their film and their achievement in having it selected for showing at this important educational event. They have brought considerable distinction to themselves and their filmmaking partners, the College and department.”
04.16.09
