About 100 people watched a screening of short films about problems women experience Wednesday afternoon.
UF’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature and Center for Children’s Literature and Culture presented a screening of “Wind of Change,” a series of short films from the Global Girls Film Festival, started by the International Children’s Media Center. The short films were shown at Smathers Library to inform Gainesville residents about the film festival, said Nicole Dreiske, the executive director of the International Children’s Media Center.
The Global Girls Film Festival is a 14-week film program during which formerly homeless women, abused young women, single mothers and women placed in detention centers show and discuss about 40 to 50 films from around the world, Dreiske said. They pick films they feel represent their struggles. UF’s screening of “Wind of Change” included six short films.
One film was based on an 11-year-old Dutch girl who suffers from Tourette syndrome, a neurological disorder. Another featured a French phone-obsessed 12-year-old who had to spend a day at his grandmother’s house in the Louisiana bayou. The team reached out to Dreiske last semester because it wanted to use media at the Baldwin Library, said Leila Estes, a coordinator at the Center for Children’s Literature and Culture.
“We want people to know just because we’re a library, that doesn’t mean we just have to have events based off books,” Estes said. “We usually bring in authors, but we met, and we wanted to do something different.”
Charlie McKnight, a 20-year-old sports management sophomore at the University of North Florida, was visiting Gainesville and said she came to the screening with the Women’s Student Association.
“These short films depicted difficulties young women and girls face,” McKnight said. “Today’s society puts so much pressure on us as women to conform and be a certain way that we forget what makes us who we are as individuals.”
