Diversity and entertainment is what Breakout Entertainment is trying to accomplish with their documentary film festival.
The festival, which will be held Tuesday, Jan. 30 at 6 p.m. in the American Ballroom at the MSC, will be showing three films titled Fuck, Half Nelson and Short Bus.
The festival is hosted by the lecture and arts part of Breakout Entertainment and is free to students.
“Originally the festival was going to be a two day event but we decided to condense it down to one night to maximize student involvement,”said Justin Cox, president of Breakout Entertainment.
The film Short Bus is directed by John Cameron Mitchell and was recently nominated for a Gotham Award and won at the Cannes Film Festival.
This film shows the lives of the cast, which live in New York City and involves the inner workings, both gay and straight of love and sex. They all have weekly meetings at a salon called the Shortbus. The entire cast is making their feature film debuts and the film is acclaimed to be one of “the best films about sex and sexuality to ever have been in mainstream entertainment”.
“We decided to schedule the film festival to give another outlook and perspective to the student body,”said Cox. “We wanted to see if the diverse entertainment would catch the attention of the students at A&M-Commerce and wanted to see if they would enjoy the same type of event in the future.”
One of the other films featured in the film festival is Half Nelson directed by Ryan Fleck and featuring Ryan Gosling, Shareeka Epps and Anthony Mackie. The film is about an inner-city junior high school teacher that challenges his students to consider everything from the Civil War to the civil rights movement. The teacher then befriends a student named Drey while trying to hide his own drug addictions.
Another featured for the festival is entitled Fuck and discusses the origins of the expletive through film clips, interviews and commentary.
The documentary stars Alanis Morrisette, Drew Carey, Kevin Smith, Ron Jeremy, Bill Maher and Sam Donaldson and is directed by Steve Anderson.
“The films featured in the festival are meant to diversify the students and we encourage everyone to come out and enjoy the festival,” said Cox.
According to Cox, Breakout Entertainment serves as the student program board for the university and provides entertainment for the students of A&M-Commerce throughout the year.
“We will also be hosting several other events during the semester,” said Cox. “We will be having an open mike night, a valentine’s day banquet as well as Battle of the Bands which will be held on Feb. 22 at 6 p.m. on the West Lawn.”