The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/filmmaking/)
In an exclusive interview with The Sun, Emmy-winning producers Scott Ferguson ’82 and Michael Kantor ’83 shared their experiences at Cornell and in show business.
Jonathan Champagne ’13 went from studying economics to pursuing acting before he ran after his dream: making films.
Reviewing Six Months to Salvation, a documentary directed and written by Lorenzo Benitez, a sophomore at Cornell and staff writer for The Sun, could present a conflict of interests. I reassure my readers, Lorenzo and I have never met. Other than our alma-mater and having read a few of his articles in The Sun, no stifling connection skews my impression of the film. I share the following review as a mostly unbiased audience member. Six Months to Salvation follows a service trip to Thailand where Lorenzo and several other volunteers teach English over a six month period.
One would expect a foreign film like Theeb to provide the audience with some sort of historical backdrop in order to contextualize a niche storyline. However, besides the minimal information that we are now in 1913 Jordan, not much else is given to Theeb’s viewers, who are immediately afterwards thrown into a jarringly different geo-historical perspective limited through the eyes of a child. Viewers quickly learn this child is the titular character Theeb who lives away from sedentary civilization. Historically keen viewers can surmise (or avid Googlers can verify) that Theeb belongs to a nomadic group of people called Bedouins. The intrinsic vagrant nature of Theeb’s life coupled with his naïve youth parallel our limited contextual understanding of the setting of the film.