Nearly four dozen UNC Greensboro students will start their Fall 2024 semester walking the red carpet. They get their own premiere for short films they’ve created around the theme “the Future.”
The Sanarchy Student Film Screening is being held in the Weatherspoon Art Museum on August 29 at 5:30 p.m. Students in UNCG’s Department of Media Studies and the animation concentration directed, edited, animated, and acted in their own productions. They’ll present 39 works in a show that is open to their peers and the community.
Looking to “the future” comes with some reflection on the past, specifically four years ago when an in-person celebration like this would not be possible.
Classes Go Virtual, Professors Make Them Global
Media Studies professors Jennida Chase and Hassan Pitts formed the Sanarchy Consortium with professors from other colleges and universities. It was a response to the restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, which took them out of the traditional, face-to-face environments where they normally taught their crafts.
“As a result of the whole world getting thrown online for education, quite a few of us got together and thought about how we can make lemonade with some lemons,” says Chase.
Sanarchy is a portmanteau of several words. It comes from the Turkish sanat, meaning “art.” Since the educators are also fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” works, they also drew from his Elven Quenya word sanar, meaning “thinker” or “reflector.” They combined those with “anarchy” as a nod to the rebellious spirit of youth and because of its similarity to “synergy.”
Sanarchy includes media, art, and design programs in Virginia, Ohio, Oklahoma, New Jersey, and the nation of Turkey. Together, the instructors designed coursework that could be done remotely. Students could contact any of the educators at the other institutions for help with an assignment, particularly if they wanted help in a field of expertise not readily available at their school.
“These professors have all collaborated pretty regularly,” says Chase. “And we have done that for some time, even before we decided to build a working consortium together.”
Each few semesters, Sanarchy picks a theme centered around a word or phrase. Their first theme was “mask,” and so some of the students’ works examined identity, isolation, and social displays. The second was “map,” which invited them to explore their relationship to physical space or specific locations.
“We asked what we can do to support our medium and our students and their interests,” says Chase. “What can we do so that we can reach out and speak with other people in other practices and other cultures?”
Students’ Work Comes Alive on Screens and Streams
At UNCG, Chase implemented Sanarchy into her Introduction to Media Production and Editing classes. Other students represent the School of Art’s animation program with Assistant Professor Dan Hale.
Since most of Chase’s students produced videos, she asked the Weatherspoon to host a film screening in their Margaret and Bill Benjamin Auditorium.
Sanarchy also gave the students a platform for their work by having them build a digital museum. Some students had their works eventually showcased in physical museums, such as Greensboro Project Space, and in South Korea and Turkey.
Stills from films to premiere at the Sanarchy Student Film Screening
Stills from films to premiere at the Sanarchy Student Film Screening
Stills from films to premiere at the Sanarchy Student Film Screening
Stills from films to premiere at the Sanarchy Student Film Screening
Stills from films to premiere at the Sanarchy Student Film Screening
Stills from films to premiere at the Sanarchy Student Film Screening
Stills from films to premiere at the Sanarchy Student Film Screening
Digital art students can take advantage of new technologies to get their work out into the world, and Sanarchy showed them those techniques at the height of the pandemic. “One thing that’s very exciting for our medium is that the streaming universe exists for us,” says Chase. “The ability to send your work digitally anywhere in the world is a super useful part of our practice that’s not true of a sculpture, which you must package carefully and send out at a very high expense.”
Chase is eager to give the students a chance to put their work out in front of an audience. She says, “I want to show students how good it feels to have a bunch of people come together and see something that they worked so hard to make and recognize that their ideas are resonating with other people.”
The Sanarchy Student Film Screening at the Weatherspoon Art Museum is free and open to the public.
Story by Janet Imrick, University Communications
Photography courtesy of Jennida Chase, College of Arts and Sciences
