Ashland University is giving students the opportunity to open their eyes to other cultures. 

In the month of September, AU will present the Spanish Language Film Festival. 

The festival, which is titled “Celebrating the New Wave of Ibero American Cinema,” is made possible by Pragda which offers grants twice a year to help high schools and universities bring in contemporary Spanish and Latin American cinema to campuses.

Dr. Jennifer Rathbun, chair of the department of Foreign Language, authored the grant and has organized the festival, but she also worked in collaboration with the Departments of English, History and Political Sciences, Global Education, The Center for Nonviolence, AU Core, Philosophy Club and Phi Sigma Iota.

The College of Arts and Sciences hosted an indifference symposium of Latin America that focused on engaging Latin American culture last semester and Rathbun wanted to continue with this initiative. 

“I saw he grant application and I said I have to do this. Everybody agree there is an interest in Latin American cultures,” said Rathbun  

“I wanted to keep going with the same enthusiasm, same interest that I saw in my colleagues and the students.”

The film festival is a great opportunity for students to look a little bit further and explore Latin American culture.

“On this campus, many of our students have not traveled yet internationally,” Rathbun said. “Some of them haven’t even traveled outside of Ohio, and it is important for us, us educators and us as an institution to prepare our students globally and to expose our students to the world.” 

The festival presents interdisciplinary movies that will reach out to students of political science, English, foreign language, students who wants to study abroad and students of philosophy. 

“So the film festival is just on out the many ways that we can reach our students and share the world to them,” said Rathbun.

   Two Spanish films with English subtitles have been shown already. 

Three more will be shown on the following dates: Sept. 15, 23 and 29. All movies start at 7 p.m. and are free and open to the public. 

Sept. 15 – “The Return” (El Regreso) by filmmaker Hernán Jiménez will be shown in the Hawkins-Conard Student Center Auditorium. “The Return” is the story of a life-changing journey back to Costa Rica. 

Sept. 23 – “Who Is Dayani Cristal?,” (¿Quién es Dayani Cristal?) will be shown in the Ronk Lecture Hall in the Schar College of Education. Deep in the sun-blistered Sonora desert beneath a cicada tree, Arizona border police discover a decomposing male body. Lifting a tattered T-shirt they expose a tattoo that reads “Dayani Cristal.” Who is this person? What brought him here? How did he die? And who—or what—is Dayani Cristal?

Sept. 29 – “Chinese Take-Away” (Un Cuento Chino) will shown in the Hawkins-Conard Student Center Auditorium. Argentina’s national treasure, Ricardo Darín, plays Roberto, a gruff, anti-social loner who lords over his tiny hardware shop in Buenos Aires with a meticulous sense of control and routine, barely allowing for the slightest of customer foibles. 

Rathbun said that students are going to learn from the world, they are going to learn about  Latin American history, they are going to learn about issues that affected the United States. 

She also said they will  learn about how the United States influences other countries. 

But more than all these things they are going to be able to see the world with other eyes which is going to enrich their own perspective of the world.