Throughout the year, screenings of movies take place all across campus for the NC State community to enjoy. Starting this semester, a new addition to these films will be available for students to experience, though these films aren’t like what you may find in your average American theater.

The Global Film Series is a new film series that will be showing on campus starting on Aug. 28, 2018, with a film from outside of the United States being featured and screened each month. Presented by the Office of Global Engagement and NCSU Libraries, the series partners with a different campus organization each month to sponsor the film being shown in that particular month. These films, pooled from multiple countries in a variety of languages, range from feature films to documentaries and showcase a wide range of topics and themes.

“For the past couple of years, we’ve been able to partner with various units on campus to present the Tournées Film Festival that happens every year in the spring,” said David Hawley, the manager of global programming in NC State’s Office of Global Engagement. “It’s the French language film festival and it has been really successful. We’ve seen that students on campus and in the community really like the international and globally-focused films, and so our thought was that if we’re having so much success with the Tournées Film Festival over a six-week period, we could extend it to a film series over the entire course of the school year.”

The Global Film Series, in working with campus organizations such as the African American Cultural Center and the University Scholars Program, hopes to bring forth films that both compliment the other film series present across campus as well as spark an academic discussion around their themes.

“There’s a lot of different groups that already have film series, such as the African Diaspora film series and the Middle Eastern film series, so there are multiple different ones, and we’d like to compliment these already existing film series,” Hawley said. “It kind of grew up organically but we really did want it to be academically focused, so all of our films include an academic introduction by a NC State faculty or staff member that’s related to that specific topic that the film is about. It’s a short introduction, a few minutes long, that kind of sets the stage for the film.”

This semester will mark the first occurrence of this film series at NC State, though it was inspired by another film festival that has previously been featured at NC State. In addition to Hawley, Marian Fragola, the director of program planning and outreach at NCSU Libraries, was involved with the development and scheduling of the series.

“This is a new series, but it’s also sort of an outgrowth of the success of the Tournées Film Festival, which we’ve had for the past three years, and there was such a great response to that,” Fragola said. “People really enjoy the opportunity to see these films that they might not ordinarily get a chance to see on campus.”

Fragola hopes that this film series will inspire students to seek out and view more films from across the world.

“I hope that students, if they’re not familiar with global films, that they’ll feel more familiarity with going to see them,” Fragola said. “Especially if there’s a film that has subtitles. Sometimes people are unfamiliar with watching films with subtitles, so they’ll give them a chance and it will be more appealing the next time since they’ve already seen a film that has subtitles or that is from a country they’re not familiar with.”

Whether viewing these films out of the enjoyment of cinema or out of curiosity towards the themes presented in them, Hawley says that these films are aimed to be a window into the experiences of individuals in the communities represented in the films.

“We’re hoping that these films help to provide a venue for students and faculty members to share their global experiences and expertise with the wider campus community,” Hawley said. “I think that films are very powerful in that they can convey emotions, challenges and successes at a more intimate and intense level that I think more people can personally identify with.”

The first film in the series, “Bad Lucky Goat,” will be shown on Tuesday, August 28th, at 6:30 p.m. in the auditorium at D.H. Hill Library.