ASSIGNMENT

You will watch two Academy Award winning live action short films. They are The Silent Child (2017), a British 20 minute short written and starring Rachel Shenton (also starring deaf 6 year-old first-time actress Maisie Sly) and directed by Shenton’s husband Chris Overton. The second film you will watch is Skin (2018) by Israeli director Guy Nattiv, co-produced by his wife Jamie Ray Newman, with a screenplay by Nattiv and Sharon Maymon (Nattiv also directed a feature film in 2018 also called Skinbut from his own screenplay and telling a different story more based on fact about a similar character). Skin is also 20 minutes long. Both films are on the class playlist.

As you watch each film answer the following questions: how does each film depict underrepresented minorities? Are the minorities depicted the target audience for the films? Looking back at the terms from the first lecture (erasure, tokenization, blind inclusion, signification) do these terms apply to the short films? And finally, how does each short deal with the depiction of ableism, classism, sexism/heterosexism, or racism? Are the films’ respective handling of these social problems effective? Why or why not?

Watch the short film Dol by Andrew Ahn. And answer two questions: (a) does this short lend itself to an intersectional analysis, and explain why it does or doesn’t, and (b) match Dol with one of the films we watched in class (except for Fire Island which Ahn also directed) and explain how the two films handle questions of identity similarly.