Convergence media students take top film festival prize

Jordyn Livingston and Tyrone Harvey  won overall film at the Richland District 2 Film Festival. Their piece, “Light Up Diversity”,  is a spoken word poem, written by Haleema Adly. Adly’s poem is about her daily life with struggles of her culture and origin. Livingston and Harvey tried to capture how she felt and they hope it will impact people who don’t understand how  Islamic go through their struggles, “Like it’s changing peoples views on how they’ve address the situation with Muslims.”, Livingston says. Many people do not understand how people, who beliefs are different from theirs, feel when you say something that you might not find offensive is actually offensive to that person.

During the filming process they had very few struggles, such as finding good shots to describe and interpret the poem, but they got through those struggles and produced an award winning film,”I felt pretty excited because we were like, trying something new and getting out of our comfort zone.” Harvey says.

 They actually thought that they did not win anything at first because as they went through the 9-12th grade category and their piece had not been announced but when they did hear their piece announced they were very happy,”Knowing overall that our story has impacted and a lot of people had seen it, and two, knowing that we actually got something out of our hard work.”, says Livingston.

They duo won over $300 worth of film equipment for their win.