Thursday, March 2, 2017

Rutgers woman pursues independent film, academia


By Ken Kurtulik – Feb. 24, 2017

Deal is pictured with her head on the desk, surrounded by various paperwork, a computer.
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Genise Paige Deal, a Rutgers University senior, is torn between a life supporting independent film and a life in academia.

Deal, a 27-year-old senior, chose to study English at Rutgers after serving two years in a national community service corps. Now interning at Women Make Movies, she is torn between supporting the arts and working in academia, Deal said.

Academia offers the opportunity to interact with people, pontificate, learn and reprocess ideas, Deal said. So many job fields consign people to drone on through soul crushing careers.
“I feel that most things that we are given as a social construction are very disillusioned into this paradigm of productivity,” Deal said.

Deal does not care to buy into consumerist society and its circular demand for hard work with intangible results, she said. People work every hour of the day just to stay secure in their dead-end jobs.

The company Deal interns with, Women Make Movies, is a non-profit distributor and sponsor of independent films about women or produced by women, according to Women Make Movies.

The eight person non-profit Women Make Movies reviews 250 films each year, selecting just 25 to send to film festivals, Deal said. The company seeks out films that depict the untold perspectives of women’s lives. One recently supported film is “Sonata,” the story of a female opera singer that returns home to the Philippines to discover and overcome the mental maladies that halted her career, she said.

Deal said she found the altruistic nature of working for the non-profit hugely rewarding.
“We aim to find women, women of color and non-binary women who have a story to tell,” Deal said.
It is more than just the stories in these films that empower women, Deal said. One recently supported documentary about underage brides in Afghanistan allowed a girl to attend performing arts high school in the U.S. Without this film, the girl’s family would have sold her into marriage with a man from Iran.

Deal works primarily in acquisition and exhibition. Acquisition, Deal said, can involve receiving submissions from film makers, or discovering films on crowdfunding sites like Gofundme. Exhibition is when Women Make Movies creates a catalog to sell to a museum or school for showcase at events like women’s history month or African American history month, Deal said.

Deal’s tattoos, piercings and hair style do not conform to societal norms, she said.
 “I’m not going to sell out. It’s difficult because a lot of professional women and professional women of color look a certain way and act a certain way,” Deal said.

Being both a woman and a person of color, Deal struggles to identify the balance she prefers between living up to the professional reputation those groups have fought for and living up to the alternative standards she sets for herself, she said.


“I’m really open to where ever life takes me. I want to do something that either helps artists or facilitates the arts,” Deal said.

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