Graduate students in film across all disciplines form a unique intersection of mentors and mentees. They represent the next generation of filmmakers, executives, below-the-line workers, media executives, below-the-line workers, media consumers, and scholars. Starting in the classroom and continuing throughout their careers, they must strive to be genuine, nuanced, and authentic storytellers. Having been an international student at public and private schools, I have had the chance to see how educational institutions, faculty, and students navigate differences, both interpersonal and in the classroom. Beyond my professional internships related to my graduate degree in screenwriting, I am also working as a teaching assistant. My experiences in professional settings and as an instructor have given me a chance to reflect on a few key moments and patterns. The main takeaways have been reminders of the collective goals to learn alongside each other and to approach our own and the work of our colleagues with specificity, agency and nuance.  

As future storytellers and filmmakers, we have a collective responsibility to be as equitable, diverse, and inclusive as possible in the ways we approach storytelling. Graduate level workshops are often referred to as microcosms of the real world, mirroring workplaces whether they are real-life sets or television writers’ rooms. Recognizing that the real world is far from ideal, we must also keep in mind that the practices we adopt in the classroom will be echoed in practice years after graduation. 

One particular story encapsulates the need for specificity in graduate level workshops. The student, who will be referenced here on out as ‘Jane’, was of Caucasian, European background. Jane was writing a story about young Ethiopian women, without doing her due diligence about the region of Ethiopia she was writing of. This lack of research included the insertion of modern-day slang in place of proper Amharic linguistics, marriage rituals, or daily rites. The class, taught by an older, male, Caucasian professor, glossed over these aspects of the script with the passing comment that it is fiction, and therefore allowed a certain amount of suspension of belief. The professor and student often looked to the only African (and BIPOC) student in the class for guidance. This other student was of Nigerian, not Ethiopian, background. In effect, Jane and the class at large were treating Africa as a monolith and ignoring the specificity in Ethiopia required to do that story justice. Jane protested the various moments of criticism, denying the erasure of the specificities of entire culture and the very people she was writing of. When faced with such moments, we must remind ourselves and those around us, whether they are colleagues or professors, that to forego specificity in our narrative storytelling is, in essence, a racist act. 

As storytellers and filmmakers, we must also keep in mind the need for agency in all aspects of our craft. In another screenwriting workshop, a fellow student once offered the note that my pages, which were written in English but included a note that certain lines were to be translated into Korean and subtitled back to English on screen, were impossible to critique because he was not familiar with the Korean language. I was, frankly, shocked. I had presented my work in fluent English, only italicizing those parts that would later be translated. I was reminded of movies such as Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino, 2009) that had a ratio of 30% English, 70% foreign languages. A peer telling me my work was not worth a simple read because I was telling a multilingual story was a reminder of the ever-present centering of whiteness that has resisted the increasingly diverse student population. My work will not and has not changed; the takeaway that day was a reminder to give agency to all, regardless of their background and I remain eager to learn. 

At the institutional level, it’s important to continually reexamine the course texts and films in a contemporary light. Faculty need not change what is being offered but rather reframe and contextualize for their current students. What good are sweeping antiracist statements and diversity summits if we are unwilling to change the racist status quo and create antiracist syllabi that teaches global works with specificity and context? The summer before the start of my graduate program, incoming students were presented with a list of ‘must read’ scripts. One of these was the Modern Family pilot, which included a casual joke about whether the adoptive daughter from Vietnam, Lily, would be able to pronounce her own name. The obvious joke here being Asian peoples’ inability to pronounce the English letter ‘L’, often pronouncing ‘R’ in its place. Needless to say, I did not finish the read and I learned the wrong lesson that day. I learned rather than learning sit-com structure, that I was going to have to navigate layers of casual and lazy racism in graduate school and most likely in professional settings. Though it may seem innocuous, it enforces harmful narratives about Asian peoples. This is not to say the script was poorly written, but simply that there should at least be acknowledgement of such moments. Furthermore, the required viewing list consisted predominantly of the ‘classics’ by Caucasian, American filmmakers. If an institution were to be proud of its globalized nature and antiracist efforts, it must expand on what it introduces as the gauge of excellence to its students. 

As a teaching assistant, I challenge my students to think about each film they study from more than a narrative and technical perspective. When we screened the movie Parasite, I spoke about the economic disparities in Korea, the reality of the low unemployment rates among youth, and Director Bong’s history of bringing forth these societal issues in his other films. Director Bong’s conversation about the universality of the particular experience: as he puts it, the collective experience of “essentially... we all live in the same country, a country called Capitalism.”[1] In discussing his work with my students, we found in the specificity and nuance came an expression of universal themes.

All this is to not to say that pursuing specificity, nuance and agency in filmmaking will not solve more entrenched issues of racism or create an entirely antiracist curriculum nor is it that we should stick to writing stories of our own backgrounds. It is not a call for victims of racial, homophobic, xenophobic violence to be guides for professors or colleagues who seek to deny them their personhood, but rather for educators to look at the material presented in classrooms from a new lens. It is not enough to introduce foreign films: we must educate on the political, cultural, and socio-economic factors that led to each film. We must approach the stories we write as well as those of our colleagues with specificity, nuance, and agency. Finally, this is not a call for the dissolution of higher education, but merely a prompting for all of us–students, faculty, and administrators – to look inward at current course offerings with antiracist intent. 

As a Korean, cisgender, straight man and first of my family to receive a graduate level education, I am still learning about the nuances of my background. As an international student from Korea raised in multiple countries seeking to work and live in the United States, I find myself navigating the American Dream daily. I tell my parents that the American Dream is real, even as I witness the disparities in classrooms and experience its faults daily. Yes, there have been frustrations and problems and moments of anger – but I am still proud of the education I am getting and the people that I am working with and learning from–professors and my cohort, alike. I want to take the best of an academic mindset into my future: curiosity, willingness to question the status quo and a passion for learning into the world. 

Institutions at large reflect the people that inhabit them. As educators, students and colleagues, the change must start in the classroom, and within ourselves.  

Dongwon Oh is an MFA candidate of screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University. He aims to explore themes of immigration, race, anti-imperialism and class in his works. He has had two short stories published in Gandy Dancer issues 8.1 and 8.2, the State University of New York literary magazine.

1. Gabriella Paiella, “Parasite Director Bong Joon-ho on the Art of Class Warfare,” GQ (8 October 2019). Doi: https://www.gq.com/story/parasite-director-bong-joon-ho-interview ↑