An adventure that lasts three months is hard to tell in a matter of minutes. A common question during the first week of school is, “How was your summer?” The response is usually, “It was great,” and then both parties move on with their lives. But once stories are told and Facebook pictures are shown, the interaction lasts longer than a walk-by greeting in the cafeteria.
In order to tell a story few have experienced, the never-before-seen HULA documentary will follow a dinner reception Friday, Sept. 7, at the Carmichael Community Center. The documentary will play on a large theater screen from a projector to incorporate the outdoors aspect of the Latin America program. In the case of rain, the premiere will take place in the Administration Auditorium.
Harding alumni Mark Slagle, Nick Michael and Tyler Jones spent the spring semester with the HULA students in Chile to film and produce the documentary. They intended to return to the United States with footage they could use to create a film about the international program and instead returned with another story to tell.
“We looked at the whole semester and tried to tell the story of the international program as simply as we could,” Slagle said. “With HULA we looked at what it means to be an explorer … how we explore as students and as people. And so we broke up the semester into … six different stories that geographically travel across the continent, just like the students do.”
Slagle graduated from Harding in the spring of 2011 and was also a part of the production process for the Harding University Greece and Florence program documentaries.
Several students in the Chile program debuted in the film for extended periods of time and were followed with a camera in order to tell their overseas story. Junior Karissa Faulk was one of the six featured in the documentary.
“I got to be used for the Machu Picchu trip, which is the one I was looking forward to the most,” Faulk said. “The video shows the tangible existence of my experience that is so hard to tell with adequate words. We now have our trip on video for the rest of our lives and people will be able to ask questions and hear stories from that.”
The documentary will not only be a time for students of the HULA program to reflect on their semester abroad, but also a chance for others who were not there to catch a glimpse of their experiences.
The production team spent countless hours filming overseas, but the work did not end once they returned to the states.
“It’s months and months of work of shooting and then trying to come back and construct all the pieces into something that makes sense,” Slagle said. “It’s really obsessive work and you’re kind of stuck behind a computer screen.”
International Programs said they hope the premiere tonight will inspire students to inquire about the opportunity to travel overseas.
“That’s really the purpose of this project — to help show the transformation and power that the international programs have and to encourage other students to take part in [it],” Slagle said. “So it will be cool to see where it goes from here. It’s fun to dream it up. It’s fun to shoot it. It’s somewhat fun to edit it, with the right amount of coffee.”
