Still from Emory Farb's short documentary Standing with Standing Rock
Description
Today's interview-only episode of the show is all about student documentaries that explore the elusive and contentious nature of American identity. Host Tom Breen is joined in the studio by Rena Tobey, who teaches an Honors College-level course at Southern Connecticut State University called “Shaping the American Identity.” As the semester nears its conclusion, she has given her students the opportunity to satisfy their final project requirements by creating short documentaries that explore some of the themes covered in the course. We’ll talk with Rena and two of her student documentarians, Evie Jenkins and Emory Farb, about the scope of this course, some of the challenges of being a student filmmaker, and trying to use documentaries to better understand what it means to be an American.