Thank you to the Faculty of Arts donors for supporting the Dean of Arts Development Fund. This award helped support me financially with the opportunity of this internship. I鈥檓 Laika Misata, I major in Liberal Arts and minor in East Asian Language & Literature. I鈥檓 interested in a variety of topics such as history, geography and linguistics.
I chose to pursue this internship with the Exposures Montreal Trans Film Festival (ETFF) because I wanted to help be a part of the mission to make transgender cinema accessible to all. My objectives with the internship were to help any way I can to share the trans experience with others, become more interconnected with the trans community and to improve my skills with community outreach.
As an intern for ETFF, I was tasked mainly with outreach. I was responsible for researching and contacting potential sponsors for the event, companies that could supply the festival with seating, food and drinks, as well as trans filmmakers whose films we were interested in screening. I also created and organized spreadsheets in order to keep track of what companies or filmmakers I contacted and was responsible for proofreading the final full screening list on the organization鈥檚 website.
As a student of Liberal Arts, I have been learning a lot about the connections between peoples across the world and have been taking numerous gender studies classes. I got to experience these connections firsthand during my internship where I was connecting with trans filmmakers from every continent across the world, looking into the films and seeing the various cultural backgrounds being united through the trans experience.
One memorable moment from the internship was when I went through the various film files and selected frames from the films that personally struck me the most to be used as the thumbnails for the festival website. This enabled me to fully take in the films in their entirety, as I analyzed the artistic composition of every second of the films.
One challenge I faced during my internship was the difficulty of communication between team members in the organization. The internship was remote so I was doing all communication through email, some of which can be easily missed, and responses can be slow. As such, I overcame this problem by communicating with some of the members of the organization through Gmail鈥檚 chat function, where short messages could be sent quickly in response to each other.
My internship with the Exposures Montreal Trans Film Festival has greatly shaped my future prospects. Because of how international the festival is, possessing films in English, French, Spanish, and more, it inspired me to minor in linguistics to learn more about languages across the world. Additionally, I am considering devoting my future career path to supporting the global trans community in any way I can, preferably through the medium of arts given the experience I鈥檝e gained from my education and internship in that field. I am very grateful for receiving the Dean of Arts Development Fund for my internship experience. It allowed me to fully concentrate on working my hardest for my organization during the summer without stressing about financial concerns.
Thank you to Professor Lisa Shapiro for making this experience possible with their support of the Dean of Arts Development Fund.
