French students win International Video Competition

They went around the world in 80 minutes—figuratively speaking, of course.
 
In the third annual International Video Competition, groups of students representing eight of the languages offered at Brandeis treated a packed viewing studio in the Shiffman Center for the Humanities to comedy, culture and acting.  
 
Students Jing Zhao ’16, An Yan ’16 and Amy Li ’17 in professor Martine Voiret’s French language course won the competition, and a $100 cash prize, for their six-minute short film entitled “I love you, my weird mother.” The movie featured the humorous relationship between a daughter and her mother and what happens when they disagree about school, eating, work and love.
 
“It was creative, funny, and their grammatical structure was very good,” says Martine Voiret, senior lecturer in French and Francophone studies, who nominated the video for the competition. “It was the whole package. They worked hard on their accents, memorized their lines, and had complex sentence structures—and there was a lot of humor in it. They were real actresses.”
 
Taking second place and earning a $50 prize were Hisae Fujiwara’s Japanese language students with their film, “The Letter.” Students Sae Yong Lee ’17, Joyce Hsiao ’18 and Julie Kim ‘18 collaborated to tell the story of Ariel and Eric, two lovers whose relationship is undermined by bad luck.
 
The short films, which were also produced by students enrolled in the German, Chinese, Italian, Hebrew, Spanish, and Russian language programs, ranged from three to nine minutes in length. The Foreign Language Oversight Committee and the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences sponsored the event.
 
"The judges commend our students for their pronunciation, scriptwriting, and acting," says Elaine Wong, Senior Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences for Undergraduate Education. "The demonstration of proficiency by students in their second semester of language study is a tribute to the outstanding work of their language professors."

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