The Common Ground University Film Series

Following the Festival in Washington, we make the selected films available as a traveling series to Universities in the United States and abroad.

We focus on colleges that have programs in:
1. Communications, Media, and/or Filmmaking.
The idea is to inspire the next generation of media executives and filmmakers to understand that it is possible to make high quality, successful films that show successful resolution of conflict.

2. Conflict Resolution and/or Peace Studies.
Here, we would like to demonstrate to professors and students alike the utility and power of film as a tool in conflict resolution.

The audience for the University Film Series is primarily graduate and undergraduate students who are enrolled in the above programs.

At each university, local faculty members and/or Search for Common Ground representatives introduce the films and facilitate discussions following the screening.

Search for Common Ground Festival: Ithaca College
Best Practices in Intra-Campus Programming

The Common Ground Film Festival created common ground on our campus. Ithaca College is a four-year undergraduate college in upstate New York, comprising four professional schools and a school of humanities and sciences. Although we are a four-year college, we aren’t all that small– we have approximately 6,000 students. It’s easy to remain ensconced within your own department.

The film festival one of the most successful, powerful, gut-wrenching, conversation-spurring, community-producing festivals we have hosted in twenty years. The discussions continued to reverberate between faculty, students and administrators for days afterwards. The festival was so much more than the films; it was about the intellectual and political issues it cracked open, generating more than dialogue. It created a community of people who agreed to enter into the often uncomfortable world of conflict resolution over some of the most difficult political issues confronting the globe. And it surprised us: as academics, we expected films that allowed us to maintain our intellectual distance. Instead, we watched demanding films that required our minds and wrenched our hearts.

The films were not what we expected—namely, films that explained problems and then offered solutions. Rather, these films shared a similar philosophical strategy even though they differed in style and approach: they went to the heart of conflicts by looking at small micro moments of real lives, and showed that the resolution of conflict is never easy and will always be painful, but most of all requires coming to grips with multiple points of view rather than simply one ideology. As one of my colleagues in Organizational Communications observed, these are films that don’t let the audience off the hook, put you through the traumatic experience and ask you to find a way out through dialogue and debate. He said that the films put us all in the position of responsibility. You can no longer say you didn't know.

Faculty and administrators were drawn to the concept and wanted to collaborate, and we coordinated the festival with a team comprising of faculty from different disciplines (Environmental Studies, Cinema Studies, Media Studies, the Hillel program director, and the Catholic chaplain). We secured financial support for this interdisciplinary initiative from the Office of the Provost, the Office of Multicultural Affairs, International Programs, the Center for the Study of Culture, Race and Ethnicity, Cinema on the Edge in the Cinema Department, Environmental Studies, Health Policy Studies, Jewish Studies, Hillel, the chaplains, and the Gerontology Institute. Given the level of misunderstanding and even hysteria about war, we decided to call the festival on our campus “WAR: Search for a Common Ground.” We raised enough money to produce a beautifully designed large poster.

We organized speakers and panels for each film, and decided not to do predictable guests (e.g., a Jewish studies faculty member with a Holocaust film) but try to facilitate common ground between the speakers. Unlike other touring festivals where we have often done only one screening, our group decided to run the films for a week on campus, opening up the sessions to the outside public. We had speakers from Philosophy, Affirmative Action, Multicultural Affairs, Near East studies, Health Policy Studies, Cinema, Political Science, and Communications.

Every show and every screening (we screened some works more than once if requested in advance by faculty) garnered large audiences. At the urging of our Gerontology Institute faculty, we ran two screenings at an eldercare facility affiliated with the college. These screenings represented the first time we had extended programming to that community. Our college President, Dr. Peggy Williams, attended one of the inter-generational screenings and shared a story of how the elderly people watching Zegota told stories of their lives following the screening.

The word “festival” conjures up celebration, community, exemption from the everyday, Bacchanal. But after our experience, it became apparent that this film festival is redefining the term. This festival produces a provisional community pressed into public responsibility and accountability across differences. And it demands that audiences not simply watch the films, but move beyond themselves to join with others of different races, nationalities and ethnicities to imagine and then to actually create with each other, in the auditoriums after each screening, common ground.

Patricia R. Zimmermann, Ph.D.
Department of Cinema and Photography
Ithaca College
Ithaca New York

Ithaca College presented
The Common Ground Film Series as a
model of intra-campus programming
at the 2003 Conference of the American
Association of Colleges and Universities.

If you are interested in bringing the Series to your University, please contact us.
Susan Koscis, Communications Director

1601 Connecticut Ave.NW, #200
Washington, DC 20009-1035
Phone: +1 (202) 777-2215
Fax: +1 (202) 232-6718
E-mail: skoscis@sfcg.org

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