To co-curator Ted Parks, Lipscomb’s documentary screening series HumanDocs means far more than an earned chapel credit.
Now, students who attend an installment of the series, typically nestled in a time-friendly slot on a Wednesday night, do earn a credit, but like most chapel opportunities, the impact goes far beyond the met requirement.
The HumanDocs film screening series aims to teach its attendees about issues facing our world through the art of the documentary, which fits right in with the genesis of the documentary form.
“My sense is that documentary has always been a form that has had an alternative distribution to commercial film,” Parks said, “and it’s always, from what I know about it, been used to raise consciousness about issues.”
Parks says that at the beginning of the documentary, filmmakers were more able to pursue the issues and topics that they were passionate about because of the leniency of not working within the confines of commercial requirements.
“Documentary filmmakers are not in it to make a buck,” Parks said. “They’re in it because they want to tell a story that they think will impact the world, and I really like that part of documentary film in contrast with commercial filmmaking.”
Parks, an associate professor, said that HumanDocs was born out of his Hispanic Cinema class. He would have students volunteer at the Nashville Film Festival as part of the course, which got Parks wondering if Lipscomb could forge a more formal bond with the festival.
“I wanted to try to develop a closer relationship between Lipscomb and the Nashville Film Festival, so talking to my colleague and a fellow HumanDocs curator, Matt Hearn, we decided to have a meeting with the film festival and see how we could do that,” Parks said.
“They suggested some films for us, and I think that it was Dr. Hearn who really thought documentaries would be the way to do it, so that’s basically how it started.”
The first installment of HumanDocs featured the documentary Garbage Dreams, which focused on the world of recycling. In the past, the series has screened such documentaries as Remote Area Medical, Inside Job, The Waiting Room, Inequality for All, Gideon’s Army and Hot Coffee.
To Parks, HumanDocs is all about education, and he hopes that the series can go past the projector and into Lipscomb classrooms.
“[HumanDocs] kind of had an academic genesis, and we still see it as very much an academic program,” he said. “By academic, meaning that we try to integrate it into the academic life at the university, and make it reinforce what’s being done in classes.”
In order to live up to this academic purpose, the series has a set list of criteria that a film must meet in order to be screened.
“We have a set of criteria that we follow,” Parks said. “One is that our HumanDocs films need to be festival quality documentaries. There are a lot of documentaries out there, especially social advocacy documentaries, that people put together because they’re passionate about an issue, but they don’t necessarily measure up to kind of the traditional cannons of documentary storytelling.”
To aid this part of the criteria, Parks travels to Washington, D.C., to attend the AFI Docs Documentary Festival in the summer to view potential titles to be screened.
On top of the documentary’s quality, a HumanDocs selection must focus in on social justice.
“I try to say before every screening that HumanDocs is grounded in the conviction that faith means working for a more just world here and now,” Parks said. “So, we try to pick films that deal with important issues of racial justice or economic justice or war and peace, labor.”
The series also partners with classes at the university that could have something to do with a film’s subject matter.
“We try to let professors know about the film so they can encourage their students to go and explore some area of their discipline that maybe they don’t explore directly in the curriculum,” he said.
In September, HumanDocs reached out to the College of Engineering to help with the post-film discussion of Big Men, a film centered on the world of oil.
As HumanDocs continues to grow, Parks hopes that the future of the series will involve more working parts in the classroom and outside of the Lipscomb walls.
“What I would like to see is more and more academic integration,” Parks said. “By that, I mean more and more ways, and better ways, to tie the films to what different professors are doing in their classes because, to me, universities are a great, untapped resource for documentary film because, as I said, it’s always had kind of an alternative distribution system.
“Universities are the logical place to show documentaries because you have a lot of people who are interested in issues and want to see different visions of the world and have change, social change, and you have people a lot of times with the time to see a documentary.
“I would like for us to have a tighter integration academically. I would love for Lipscomb to kind of become the hub of other universities that do HumanDocs-like series. I think we could help other schools get started by kind of adapting our model.”
Parks said he would also love to be able to bring in more documentary filmmakers who could talk about their work and participate in workshops.
One HumanDocs night that will always stick with Parks was the night that Me Facing Life: Cyntoia’s Story screened.
The documentary tells the story of Cyntoia Brown, a student in Lipscomb’s LIFE Program, an outreach ministry at the Tennessee Prison for Women. The filmmaker, Dan Birman, was in attendance.
Parks said that around 400 people packed the screening room, many with varying connections to the film.
Nashville Public Television was even involved with the screening, helping convert the film into a playable DVD, as the doc was still in its original form at the time of the screening.
“It was just an amazing night,” Parks said.
To Parks, HumanDocs serves an important purpose in educating the Lipscomb community in a unique way.
“I really believe in HumanDocs as far as the issues that it raises because some of the issues that it raises are difficult to raise in classes or maybe difficult to raise in the way that an hour-and-a-half film can raise,” he said.
“So, I feel that HumanDocs provides a forum on campus for issues to come before students and the community that might not otherwise come before a large number of students.”
Screening of ‘César’s Last Fast’ slated for Wednesday
HumanDocs’ second installment of the semester will commence on Wednesday, with a screening of César’s Last Fast in Shamblin Theatre at 8:30 p.m.
The documentary provides insight into the work of famed activist César Chávez and the United Farm Workers through looking at Chávez’s last fast in the ’80s.
“It’s a really striking portrait of what those leaders did to try to ensure better working conditions and better pay for migrant farm workers, and that’s still a struggle that I think is so alive,” Parks said.
Lisa Steele, developer of intercultural development and coordinator of Latino student services, will facilitate the post-documentary discussion.
The documentary was a selection of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.
(Headline photo above: A scene from previous HumanDocs selection, Remote Area Medical. Both photos courtesy of Lipscomb’s website)