Rebecca Munday, Staff Writer
Dr. Michel Man and his colleague, Dr. Hapsatou Wane, invited the Department of Foreign Languages director and another professor to help them judge Armstrong campus’s first French Film Competition.
The competition was held between 4 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. on April 29 in the Language Lab, which is located in Gamble Hall.
There were eight videos submitted to the competition. The videos varied in length and topic.
One girl named Mallory introduced her parents, sisters and the family dog at the beginning of the family vacation they took to the beach. That video won third place in the competition.
A few students did a tour of their room. They went around the room and named the things in the room. One girl even read off note cards as she went around the room and said things like “C’est mon bureau.” Or “This is my desk.”
A couple other students toured the campus. One group gave directions to different places around campus using the campus map.
Another group talked about the different buildings on campus and what each of them did.
One of the members of that group, Natalia Santiago Melendez lamented about how difficult it was to film the video for the competition. She and her partner went around campus for about two hours to film all the footage they needed for the video. Then, they had to cut and splice all the footage together and the video ended up being only about eleven minutes.
Santiago Melendez said, “When we were filming it was so hot outside.”
Then, the rest of the videos were unconventional displays of the students’ knowledge of the French language.
The winners of the competition, Brook, Kelly, Abriel and Taylor Wright, filmed a video about American culture. They talked about food, fashion and other parts of American culture.
Man will leave the Armstrong Campus at the end of the semester. He will be replaced with a faculty member from Statesboro.
However, Man hoped by hosting the first French Film Competition this semester that the department would take initiative and continue this tradition in the semesters to come.
Professor Man talked about offering prizes to the winners even though they did not have enough time to come up with any this year. He hopes that after he leaves the university, the department will continue the competition and expand it to the other campuses of Georgia Southern University and other universities across Georgia.
