Newswise — Ithaca College’s Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) and its collaborative partners, Park Media Lab (Park School of Communications) and EngageMedia (Indonesia), are issuing a call for entries for “Checkpoints Story Contest.” This international social media project will feature stories that examine the ways in which people and forces confront and encounter checkpoints.
“Checkpoints suggest boiling points, border points, match points and flashpoints as principles of operation and crossings to somewhere else,” said Patricia Zimmermann, a codirector of FLEFF.
“We are looking for stories about where we check, check up, spot check, checkmate and get checked,” added Tom Shevory, also a FLEFF codirector. “We are asking contestants to share their stories and make a point.”
Judges will be novelist and editor Leslie Daniels (USA) and author and scholar Cherian George (Singapore). The deadline for submissions is August 1. The winner will receive a cash prize of $500 (USD). Two honorable mentions prizes of $100 (USD) each will also be awarded.
Checkpoint stories may be in the form of fiction, nonfiction or poetry. The limit is 500 words; there is no submission fee. Contestants submit by pasting their stories into the body of an e-mail to [email protected]. Stories submitted as file attachments will be disqualified. Name, hometown, country and e-mail contact must be included at the end of the story.
Each month the contest is open, the FLEFF team, in consultation with the judges, will select stories suitable to be performed by professional actors and filmed by professional media makers from the Park Media Lab. The productions will then be uploaded on EngageMedia.org, a high-traffic social media site for environmental and human rights.
Launched in 1997 as an outreach project from Cornell University’s Center for the Environment at Cornell University, the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival was moved permanently to Ithaca College in 2005. It is housed in the Office of the Provost as a program to link intellectual inquiry and debate to larger global issues.
For more information on FLEFF, visit www.ithaca.edu/fleff or contact Patricia Zimmermann at [email protected].
RSS