Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Lunch and a Movie at the Humanities
By Amber Knight

“Songs Around the World,” a film by the group Playing For Change, was the feature presentation of the Humanities Department’s first “Lunch Hour Film Festival”, held last week Thursday at noon in room 200 of the Humanities building.
This film was chosen by Mary Alexander, the administrative assistant for the Humanities Department. Alexander could not resist the “urge to share” after discovering the film and the group through YouTube and late night television, Alexander siad.
Experiences like these are what led Alexander to create the Lunch Hour Film Festival. “I have been thinking of doing this for some time now,” Alexander said. She will be showing films with a humanitarian focus, on the last Thursday of every month to any one on the St. Thomas campus who is attracted to interesting films that are not always shown at the Market Square Theater.
The people in attendance last Thursday enjoyed their lunch as they were taken to 22 different countries around the world. Street and professional musicians contributed their talents for one mission. Their mission is to inspirer each other and come together as a human race through music. These musicians have never meet, yet there voices and instruments are united for twenty minutes as they playing five universally known songs.
Some of the upcoming films include “Short cut to Nirvana” which portrays the Kumbh Mela, a spiritual festival in India that more than 70 million pilgrims attend every twelve years, and “Rivers and Tides” about Andy Goldsworthy, an artist whose specialty is ephemeral sculptures made from elements of nature according to the IMDb website