Part Ten: The College Film Experience

My college film experience begins and ends with literally dozens (or probably hundreds, actually) of nights in dorm rooms and apartments spent watching movies and/or playing movie trivia. I have so many good memories associated with those that it would be impossible to dwindle it down. The memories of the family I made of friends and film-lovers while I was living in Columbia, especially during summer 2007, will always have the warmest place in this film-lover's (and friend's) heart.

Aside from those more personal memories, two student clubs, Film Club of MU, of which I was president for two and a half years, and Mizzou Students for Film, of which I was a founding member, were also integral parts of my college film experience. I started attending FCMU meetings, where we would watch and discuss films, the first semester of my freshman year and by the first semester of my junior year, I was the president. FCMU and Ragtag pretty much cured any bit of homesickness I might've been feeling at the start of my freshman year.

At its start, MSFF consisted of about 10 freshmen and three sophomore women. It all started when one of the freshmen decided to start a Facebook group for people interested in getting a film major going at Mizzou; he invited all the people who had "Film Studies" listed in their area of concentration, and pretty soon we started to get serious about it. We made a couple of short films as a group, we got press, we held a fundraising concert. The momentum was pretty strong that first year, and for a while it looked like it actually might happen. Unfortunately, it didn't happen until most of the founding members were gone. Mizzou will officially have a film major starting in the winter semester of 2010. However, Professor Roger Cook, who is the chair of the Film Studies department and was also involved with MSFF, cited the group and its founding members for getting the ball rolling.

Like most universities, the student association also sponsored weekly film showings at the student union. I wound up going to a few of them, and during one of the first weekends of my freshman year, they had a double billing of the Kill Bill movies. I wound up going alone, and ran into another kid from my dorm there, who wound up becoming one of my closest friends.

Also worth repeating mentions of here: my college film experience would not have been complete without Ragtag, midnight shows, film classes (I detailed those in previous posts) and the True/False Film Festival (which I'll go into in the next post).