This Wednesday, October 9, 2019, Dr. Audrey Evrard, Assistant Professor of French at Fordham University in New York City, will present a public screening of Femmes Précaires, a French documentary film by Marcel Trillat. The film explores how job precarity and financial instability usually affects women in part-time jobs, often to support children. While this documentary was released in 2005, this particular viewing is one of a kind. It will be the first time that Femmes Précaires will be screened in the U.S. — with English subtitles.
The subtitles are the result of Dr. Evrard’s innovative classroom teaching and application of experiential learning, and were created with Amara by the twelve students from her course “French Documentary in Action” at Fordham. For those who are not familiar, experiential learning provides students with an opportunity to expand their learning through the act of doing. It allows students to develop professional skills, see how their class knowledge can be applied in the workplace, and be exposed to career avenues they may not have realized, were an option. One of the major outcomes of “the act of doing” is that students can make more informed decisions about their career path, with the intention of helping them successfully transition into the job market after graduation.
To achieve her vision of experiential learning in the classroom — while maintaining privacy and restricting outside contributions — Dr. Evrard turned to Amara. After consulting with the Amara team, the Enterprise platform was chosen, as it enabled a private workspace and presented an easy user interface for students that were new to subtitling. Students were arranged into groups of four, for a total of three groups (i.e. three Amara workspaces), which enabled the class to finish the entire documentary within 6 weeks. This process effectively made it easy for Dr. Evrard to monitor and grade the students’ work while maintaining the quality of the subtitles for the premiere in America.
To make the film ready for screening, the pièce de résistance was to overlay the subtitles (or “embed” them) onto the film with the help of Amara On Demand. The project also allowed Dr. Avrard to share the results of her work as part of her tenure package. At the end of project, Dr. Avrard said, “Everyone on the Amara team is just amazing…. It was such a wonderful and formative experience for me and the students to work on [Amara].”
The screening takes place this Wednesday, October 9 (details below). Marcel Trillat will be in attendance, and the screening will be followed by a roundtable with the filmmaker and guest speakers for a discussion on the film, as well as questions around employment, gender inequality and job precarity in both France and the United States.
Femmes Précaires
in French with English subtitles (81 min.)
Followed by a roundtable with the filmmakers
and guest speakers
Wednesday, October 9, 2019
5:30 – 8:30 p.m.
Fordham University-Lincoln Center Campus
Law School 3-09
150 W. 62nd St., New York, NY
If you are an educator or instructor and are interested in leveraging Amara for experiential learning, please contact us. We’d love to help.
