Asking college students what they want to do with their lives is about as productive as asking what the meaning of life is. Regardless of how intelligent or accomplished the student is, the answer is most often a blank look, a shrug or a dismal groan. Junior Julia Love, despite being the producer and director of three acclaimed documentaries, is no exception. Her future is clear-to everyone but her, that is.
"Film keeps grabbing me back," Love said. "None of this was planned by any means, but it all ended up being an amazing experience."
Her latest venture was creating a recruitment documentary for Service Opportunities in Leadership. The program features a half-credit course in the spring, a community-based internship in the summer and a research seminar in the fall; the summer internship is the crux, said SOL program coordinator Joy Mischley.
As a student in the program, Love planned to intern at the Albuquerque Borders City Project, but just before the spring semester ended, the organization went bankrupt, leaving Love without an internship. With few options and less time, Love and the SOL office scrambled to find another possibility. Love herself proposed a creative alternative: producing a documentary as a recruitment project for SOL.
"Julia was doing two things when she made the documentary," said Alma Blount, a lecturer with the public policy department who works with SOL. "First, she was serving us, but more importantly, this ended up being her own summer leadership project."
The idea for Love's proposal came from her prior experiences with making documentaries. With a film-making father, Love grew up surrounded by the Pittsburgh film community.
As a high school student, she produced and directed "Women in the Wings: Pittsburgh's World War II Workers," a film about women who built fighter planes during the 1940s. The film, which took Love about three years to make and included an introduction by former president George Bush, received much acclaim and enjoyed several distinguished showings.
"Originally I just wanted to tell their story," Love said. "It really gave them a voice. One of the women had never graduated and she was so excited she was getting to speak at the Harvard showing of the film.... You can see how much difference it made in their lives."
In the wake of that attention, Carnegie Mellon University hired Love to make a documentary on its Nobel Prize-winning economist Herb Simon. Then, the spring before she was to do her summer SOL internship, Love took a class on documentary film-making, a course that gave her the chance to do her own filming, something she had not done before. All this set the scene for her making the SOL documentary.
Mischley and Blount gave Love a few guidelines for the documentary. From that, Love decided which and how many internships to feature in the film. Because the students' internships spanned only nine weeks, she also had to adopt the same schedule for filming them.
Although she originally wanted to film all the SOL students, she realized this plan was too difficult, and instead decided to feature four students in three different internships. She captured on film senior Stephen Poon in his internship in a Chicago health clinic, senior Gen Daftary in her clinical health placement internship in Pittsburgh, and juniors Mariela Tsuboyama and Lauren Vose in Honduras.
According to Mischley and Blount, the documentary surpassed all their expectations.
"We were just blown away," Mischley said. "Our agreement was just for footage, but when she came back to school in August, she had a finished product. It was really rewarding and interesting to witness the students at their internships. I had never gotten to see them at work before. And as I watched it more and more, I appreciated the artistic qualities of the film. She had a lot of beautiful shots and let the SOL students narrate the documentary."
SOL now uses Love's documentary for recruitment. After hosting a private showing of the film last semester, program officials gave each of the SOL students a copy and asked them to show it to at least two people.
"I think the video really helps the program," Daftary said. "Usually students just read about or hear about the program, but when they watch the documentary, they are actually getting to see a small portion what SOL is really about. That helps in two ways: First, it helps attract more people and second, it helps them figure out if it is right for them."
To Love, her documentaries are not so much about the awards they achieve as they are about story-telling. "I just want them to be thought-provoking and get a response," she said.
This semester, Love is studying in Bolivia, where she might make a documentary about Bolivian artists. However, she does not know whether her long-term future plans will include film-making.
"I have no idea what I want to do," Love said. "I'm interested in using film to advocate policy, but I think my life will take me wherever it wants to go. If film keeps calling me... well, we'll see."
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