Eve Golecruz used her communications class to create a short film exploring her identity and the environment that was accepted into the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital.
A chance meeting sparked a passion that Carolina senior Eve Golecruz didn’t know she had.
The chemistry and communications double-major in the College of Arts & Sciences was attending a panel at the Women of Color Conference when she met Mitzi Jonelle Tan, a climate advocate in the Philippines who spoke about dedicating her life to environmental activism. Eve, who was born in Manila, Philippines, immediately wanted to know more about Mitzi’s work and the environmental hardships facing the people of her home country.
In spring 2021, she used COMM 622 (formerly COMM 690) – Environmental Filmmaking, taught by Julia Haslett – as the catalyst.
Eve, who had never made a film longer than two minutes, dove into her new work, “My Vulnerable Country,” building rigs out of ladders and chairs to artfully capture photographs of her childhood in Manila, juxtaposed with video highlighting the impacts of recent climate-induced flooding in the Philippines.
Through her film, Eve explores her identity as a Filipino-American and the dissonance she feels between her Asian heritage and American culture. Off screen, she explored how her intersecting passions for filmmaking and the environment might continue to make positive change.
“It was a semester of epiphanies,” Eve said.
Those epiphanies lent nuance and complexity to “My Vulnerable Country,” which was recently accepted in the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital (DCEFF), the world’s premier showcase of environmentally themed films. (Eve’s professor has a feature film, “Pushed up the Mountain,” in the same festival.)
“It’s a huge deal for a student to get programmed in such a prestigious festival,” Julia Haslett said of her student.
The Environmental Film Festival runs March 17–27.
By Jess Abel ’19