University students focused their camera lenses on the east side of Austin for associate professor Andrew Garrison's East Austin Stories class. The year's project yielded documentaries that will be screened in Austin next week.
This semester's class is made up of radio-television-film students, non-production graduate students, a middle-school teacher and a historian.
Students are responsible for finding subjects for their documentaries and developing the story. The short films will be screened for the public Dec. 13.
"It gives documentary production students a real, authentic audience, not just professors, friends and family," Garrison said.
Garrison implemented the program six years ago with help from Miguel Guajardo, now an assistant professor at Texas State University, and Juan Valadez, former youth pastor at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church.
Students first learn the geography of the area by studying maps and taking a tour around East Austin.
Alisha Brophy, a radio-television-film graduate student, had moved to Austin from Southern California less than three weeks before the beginning of the semester.
"All I knew about East Austin was people in California saying don't look in East Austin when apartment hunting," Brophy said.
Garrison said screening the films in front of a real audience motivates students to create quality productions.
Brophy is part of a group that worked on the story of Daniel Gomez, who from 1999 to 2004 was the creator of Hispanic Connect, a Web site aimed at Hispanic users. Gomez was also the implementer of a club called East Austin Cyber Surfers that taught kids to use the Internet, Brophy said. He subsequently lost it all to a drug addiction, a divorce and a battle with Hepatitis C.
Brohpy's film documents Gomez and his son, who are working to get him back on his feet.
"The film ended up being a tribute to the father-son relationship rather than on any specific aspect of Daniel's life," Brophy said.
The media's heavy portrayal of gangs, drugs and violence in the area create a stereotype about East Austin that isn't accurate, and the aim of the project is to give students an opportunity to expose their films, as well as learn about an area rich in diversity, Garrison said.
"I think the project is as much about de-mystifying East Austin for people living on the 'right' side of the tracks," said Jonas Hall-Norregaard, a radio-television-film junior.
Hall-Norregaard worked on a film about an underprivileged girls' soccer team that used the sport as an educational means. "There is a cultural difference between the east and west, but it is something that is really beneficial to experience," Hall-Norregaard said.
The films will be shown in two separate screenings on Dec. 13. Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church will host the first show at 6:30 p.m., and a second showing is scheduled for 9:30 p.m. at Cafe Mundi on East Fifth Street.
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