VGCC Invites Community To Free Fall Film Festival
The Vance-Granville Community College Cultural Enhancement Committee will host a film festival for students and members of the community on three Wednesdays this fall.
Lineup for the festival is “Life is Beautiful” on Oct. 22, “Amistad” on Oct. 29 and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” on Nov. 12. The movies will be shown at 4 p.m. on those days in the small auditorium in Building 2 on the main campus in Vance County. Admission is free.
The film festival is part of the committee’s program to promote cultural awareness on campus. The committee, which is composed of faculty and staff members, chose the three films to be shown from a list of suggested movies. Cultural accuracy was a major criterion for their selection.
“Life is Beautiful” kicks off the festival Oct. 22 and is a story about a father’s love for his wife and son in the midst of the Holocaust. Winner of Academy Awards for Best Actor (Roberto Benigni) and Best Foreign Film in 1998, “Life is Beautiful” weaves a story of a Chaplinesque character who charms a beautiful teacher into marrying him. Then they and their young son are sent to a Nazi concentration camp, and the film handles their struggle to survive and protect the boy with simple ingenuity.
“Amistad,” the Oct. 29 offering, is a 1997 film starring Morgan Freeman and is based on a true story of a group of Africans who rose up against their captors on the high seas in 1839 and were taken to court in New England. Slavery itself is not the issue in this film. Instead, the court must decide whether the defendants were born of slaves, in which case they are guilty of murder, or were illegally taken from Africa, and therefore had a right to defend themselves against kidnapping. To complicate matters, seven of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices at the time were slave-owning Southerners.
Closing out the film series on Nov. 12 will be the comedy, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” the story of the response of a Greek family whose daughter, Toula, marries a man who isn’t Greek. The daughter feels her life is mapped out for her – marry a Greek boy, have Greek babies and cook lots of Greek food. However, she is 30 years old, and has no marriage prospects and no strong desire to spend her life working in the family restaurant. Toula’s journey to find herself leads her to change jobs and go back to school. And when she meets somebody who is not Greek, the complications (and laughter) begin.
No reservations are required. Just
