Third film in trilogy tackles race in the US

Published 13/07/2016

A documentary film following young American students on a road trip through the southern United States will be released this autumn as part of a trilogy aimed at exploring race and multiculturalism through education.

The feature-length film American Textures was directed by Arnd Wächter as the third film following previous documentaries Crossing Borders and The Dialogue released through his charity Crossing Borders Education.

The newest film diverges from the trilogy’s first films that show American study abroad students interacting with Muslim and Chinese peers in Morocco and China. American Textures follows six black, white and latino American students as they explore the historical hotbed of America’s racial divide.

“The whole idea is to provide intercultural learning through intercultural issues and diversity issues back home”

“The first two are very focused on intercultural education and also the field of study abroad,” Wächter told The PIE News. To make the third film, he said he wanted to address the 98% of US students who don’t study abroad.

Wächter said he was inspired by the media attention around police violence sparked by the shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri last year and the resignation of the president of University of Missouri over the mishandling of racist incidences on campus.

“The whole idea is to provide intercultural learning through intercultural issues and diversity issues back home.”

Despite the US-centric context, Wächter argues that students around the world will be able to relate to the diversity challenges shown in the film.

“That is not just true for the United States, Britain has their cases of that, many European countries are now getting it fresh through the refugee crisis. So we see that very direct link as well to how to deal with internal diversity and tensions around that and intercultural skills, communication skills when it comes to diversity within our countries.”

Like the other two films, CBE has also developed educational “toolkits” that educators can purchase to create seminars and discussion groups on campus alongside screenings of the film.

CBE worked with the New York Film academy, National Geographic and SIT Graduate Institute to produce the film. Wächter said he aims to release it to festivals this autumn/winter and to screen it on some 500 US campuses in the spring.

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