By Ken Kurtulik – Feb. 24, 2017
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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