Iranian film series promotes cultural understanding.



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Thursday: 23-August-2001

Iranian film series promotes cultural understanding

By Tim Brouk, Journal and Courier

B. Frédérique Samuel is a man on a mission.

An assistant at the Center for Instructional Excellence at Purdue University and a former graduate student in communication, leisure behavior and leisure counseling at Purdue, Samuel has been building a cultural bridge between the Greater Lafayette community and the vast international university student population since 1992 through a film series and discussion groups.

“When I came here, I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s a cultural desert.’ I was crying. I had no idea what I was coming to,” Samuel said.

Samuel’s latest film series, “A Season of Films from Iran,” seeks to provide insight on the wide array of movies produced by Iranian directors. Some films were only recently released after being held by Iranian government censors for years and will piggyback with the Sears Lecture Series at Purdue that will look at the United States’ relationships with Iran before the Shah, after the Shah and in the future.

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(Photo by Tom Leininger, Journal and Courier)

PURDUE PROJECT: B. Frédérique Samuel listens to a point being made during the Global Forum: Looking In, Looking Out at the St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center. Samuel is putting together an Iranian film series at Purdue.

“I’ve been wanting to do an Iranian series, and this is a good excuse to do it,” Samuel said.

Children of Heaven (1997) will kick off the free series at 7 p.m. Saturday at Purdue’s Stanley Coulter Hall, Room 239. “A Season of Films from Iran” will continue at 7 p.m. every Saturday through Dec. 15. A second film series, “A Season of Films on Peace and Anti-War,” continues at Johnson Hall of Nursing, Room B-002 (basement lecture hall 2), at 7 p.m. Wednesdays. This Wednesday, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) will be featured.

Samuel said the majority of Iranian films deal with the ups and downs of relationships and community issues with subtle, political overtones. He compared the films’ simple, realistic tales to that of The Bicycle Thief, a 1947 Academy Award-winning Italian film that portrays the devastating week a man spends trying to find his stolen bike. A similar plot appears in The White Balloon, screening Sept. 29, where a little girl drops her money for the market down a sewer drain. The community rallies around her to get it back.

Samuel has noticed more US American undergraduate students checking out his screenings. He said anywhere between 20 to 80 community members, international students and Purdue faculty and graduate students attend. A discussion of the film always follows the ending credits.

Samuel, who was born in Malaysia and grew up in Singapore and England, was treated to a variety of international films at area theaters when he was a graduate student at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. When he transferred to Purdue, he found there was little if anything offered in the way of foreign films being shown for the public.

“I always solve a problem. If the community doesn’t do it, I’ll do it,” Samuel said.

Samuel also coordinates the discussion groups International Social & Discussion Group, 6 p.m. Mondays through Dec. 7, and the Global Forum: Looking In, Looking Out, 12:30 p.m. Wednesdays through Dec. 5, at the St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center, 535 W. State St.

“It’s a global world now,” Samuel said. “That means our students should be knowing about the world.”

At the International Group, Samuel raises two or three international news items a week and divides those in attendance in small groups to talk about them. To also get his mostly international crowd more familiar with US American culture, Samuel introduces political terms like “filibuster” and “minority party” and some idioms to them.

“Some idioms are literal like ‘finding a needle in the haystack,’ and some are metaphorical where you have to think about it like ‘catch-22’,” Samuel said. “Someone would usually say, ‘Ah, we have one in our country’ like ‘an ant on an elephant,’ for example. It becomes a joke for a few weeks.”

Global Forum is a quick, brown-bag lunch program that features guest speakers giving a 15- or 20-minute presentation on a topic and the rest of the hour is given to questions or discussion. On Wednesday, Dr. Judith Myers-Walls of the department of child development and family studies at Purdue will discuss “families as educators for global citizenship.”

On the Net

Find out more about B. Frédérique Samuel’s film series and discussion programs by logging on to:

Journal and Courier, 2001

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