RUTV Rocks!

“Wow.”

That is seriously the only word which I can use to describe it. ‘Fantastic’, ‘amazing’, ‘brilliant’ and ‘awesome’ are good too, but they really don’t capture how utterly fabulous it was. I don’t have an adjective to describe it. What am I going on about? The RUTV documentary film festival, which was held last Tuesday night. It was wicked.

They rented out all three of Roxbury’s cinemas and screened 11 of the fourth year journalism student’s short films. I feel really sorry for all of the first years who are giving up on journ already, because it gets SO much better than Propp and Todorov (not a vacuum cleaner … haha, Sim & Alette)! Note to prospective first years: don’t give up your dream career just because your first year of lectures isn’t what you thought it would be.

The RUTV film festival was absolutely fantastic: the films were all so thought-provoking and professional. They included topics like love and marriage after being diagnosed with HIV, the life of a paranoid schizophrenic, a profile of a prostitute working in Grahamstown, celibacy, alternative religions (Wicca, paganism, etc), the Rastafari community living in Knysna and the near-extinction of Zimbabwe’s rhinos. There was also a really scary but extremely impressive undercover investigation of the illegal abortions that have been offered in Grahamstown recently.

To all you future first years out there, here’s a bit of advice: go to the extra shows / debates / film screenings / events which are held in the evenings. I know will probably just want to collapse somewhere soft in front of the TV after a hard day of lectures (cough), but these after-hours events are amazing. They really show you a different side of university life, and are really interesting and cause you to think critically about the wider planet Earth. I went to a vegetarianism debate held by the Rhodes Organisation for Animal Rights (ROAR) and a film screening of the movie ‘The 11th Hour” earlier on this semester. They were both very informative, and much more entertaining than an evening at home watching Days of our Lives.

Now go out there and change the world!

Meat_is_murder

***Photos by Activate photographer, Stacey Bruton***