At the Movies

Purpose

Developing cross-cultural competency often represents significant personal change not feasible through traditional intellectual classroom and academic activities alone. Research suggests that the greatest intercultural competence development opportunities arise through experiencing high cultural novelty. The Immersion Experience is a short duration, high novelty experience to provide you with an opportunity to plan, experience, and reflect on intercultural situations. Using the movie experience and your reflection memo will help you to better understand your sources of weakness in intercultural competence.

Assignment: “At the Movies”

Do some research to identify a film to view. The film could be a documentary about a cultural group or country/region. I could be about a topic you find controversial or challenging to understand or represents a viewpoint very different from your own. Explain why the film is appropriate for this assignment and why you chose it.

General Assignment Requirements

Write and Submit a short memo (1 page) containing the following items:

a. Identify the movie that is the basis of the memo.

b. Explain why you chose this particular movie.

c. Briefly describe the details of the movie (who, what, where, why, etc.).

d. Discuss your reactions (thoughts, emotions) during the movie. Consider describing things like: What surprised you? What unexpected reactions did you have to the movie? Analyze those reactions and discuss whether they were founded or not? Your personal feelings of comfort, discomfort, enjoyment, etc. You could, for example, use the cultural frameworks we will consider in class to help with this (e.g., Hofstede) to help you analyze your feelings/reactions.

e. Conclude with what you learned from the movie.