State Dept. awards grant to teach filmmaking in Turkey

SUNY Fredonia’s Department of Communication has been awarded a grant by the U.S. Department of State to travel to Turkey and instruct high school and college students interested in video production and filmmaking. 

Fredonia was the lone organization chosen among 15 applicants to travel to six Turkish cities during an 18-month youth filmmaking instructional project.
 
The grant consists of nearly $525,000 in federal funds, to go with matching funds in excess of $260,000, for a total project cost of approximately $785,000.
 
“This is an exciting and rare opportunity for our department, and we are thrilled to have the chance to positively impact so many young minds,” said Ted Schwalbe, Department of Communication chairman.  “These students have a real desire to learn these skills as a tool to explore the changes and differences, culturally and socially, present in their country.”
 
Leading the project along with Dr. Schwalbe is Assistant Professor Nefin Dinc, a native of Turkey who has been studying in the U.S. since 2002 and a member of the Fredonia faculty since 2005.  Her chief area of expertise focuses on documentary filmmaking.  Not only did she offer considerable expertise for both the country and this subject area, she also identified a strong partnering agency within Turkey: Atlantik Film, based in Istanbul.
 
“There’s no question, Nefin’s role within our campus and department played a huge factor in our being chosen by the project’s selection committee,” Schwalbe added.
 
The six cities include Konya, Antakya, Artvin, Mardin, Sivas, and Edirne, and were selected by Professor Dinc to ensure that a diverse cross-section of the country was chosen, representing a broad variety of demographics.  Each city will cycle through three training sessions, totaling 21 days over the course of the next 12 months.
 
“We will not only be teaching students the skills needed to tell a story using video,” Professor Dinc said, “but we’ll be assisting them in creating an awareness of and a dialog about democracy, economic development and women’s rights.  It’s exciting to return home to lead such a worthwhile effort.”
 
The grant itself is very significant for Fredonia, as it ranks among the largest the university has ever received for a project with such a relatively short timeframe (18-months), according to Maggie Bryan-Peterson, director of the Office of Sponsored Programs, which assisted the Department of Communication in applying for this grant.
 
“Although we can’t name the other universities involved, we beat out some very prestigious institutions, many of which are much larger than Fredonia,” Ms. Bryan-Peterson said.  “It is proof to everyone, both within and outside our campus, that the talented and gifted Faculty we have here allows us to really compete with bigger institutions for quality grants.”
 
The project has established some ambitious targets.  Dr. Schwalbe hopes to have the 12 students at each of the six selected cities produce three, 20-minute films of either a fictional or documentarian nature.  The 18 resulting films will then be shown at film festivals in New York City, Boston and Washington, D.C., in addition to local screenings in Buffalo, Jamestown and the Dunkirk/Fredonia region.  In addition, the films will be screened at Turkish film festivals in Ankara, the country’s capital, as well as Istanbul and Diyarbakir.
 
Fredonia will also host select students from these cities during a two-week stretch in Sept. 2009 during which the students will undertake the editing and production work on their films, under the guidance of Fredonia faculty while using Fredonia’s state-of-the-art computer lab resources.  Finally, in January 2010, all of the students and people involved will return to Ankara for a final film festival and celebration of the project’s completion.
 
Throughout all of this, Professor Dinc and Atlantik Film will be simultaneously producing a documentary about the project itself.
 
This is the latest in a series of relationships and successful partnerships Fredonia has undertaken within Turkey.  In addition to having several Turkish faculty members, Fredonia has already established dual degree relationships with two Turkish universities.  This fall, Fredonia will host 12 exchange students from Ege University — the fourth-oldest university in Turkey — for the full semester.  Then, in the fall of 2009, it will welcome up to 30 students from Izmir University of Economics.
 
“With all of this activity happening on our campus, it quickly became apparent that we were ‘a natural’ for this project,” Ms. Bryan-Peterson added.  “The grant reviewers later told us, the more they read our proposal, the better they liked it.”
 
Dr. Schwalbe added that being selected to lead this project is a tremendous honor, as well as a point of distinction for his department.  “It certainly raises our reputation in the area of international learning and training,” he said.