Creative responses to Me, The “Other”
Community Conversations and MTO
“Community Conversations” is a community of residents, students, organizations, and businesses in Hillsborough, New Jersey, committed to strengthening their social fabric for the betterment of the whole community. Together, they watched Me, The “Other” and then explored the different types of discrimination, bias and rejection addressed in each story and shared their own feelings and reactions to these stories. Their conversations lasted well past midnight and left them with many takeaways including this question: “What does safety mean? No judgment, no othering, connecting with a person's heart and not their circumstances, giving a person’s noble spirit a chance to breathe,” wrote one of its organizers, Nishat Ruiter.
MTO Online Photography Exhibit
Spearfish, South Dakota responded to viewing the film Me, The “Other” by creating a photo exhibit that explores the diversity within their own community. “We gathered 12 individuals from the Spearfish community to be a part of a temporary photography exhibit currently installed at the Matthews Art Gallery. A collection of portraits, taken by Alison Murphy (BHSU photography student), accompanied by autobiographical statements, tells a story of our community where we all share the human experience of being an ‘other,’” wrote Elizabeth Freer in the Black Hills Pioneer.
Student Videos About their Experiences with “Otherness.”
Bernis Joel Rusk, an Okanagan College student, speaks about his experiences with “otherness.”
British Columbia, Canada - In collaboration with Me, The “Other,” Okanagan College (located in the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan people in British Columbia, Canada) will be launching a campus-wide Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) project, in which all students will be invited to recount their personal experiences with prejudice and otherness. The College’s Department of Sociology recently tried out this idea and included it as an assignment for one of their classes. The above video is the moving story shared by one of the students, Bernis Joel Rusk. The project will be fully launched in Fall 2021 and more student videos will be shared through this website and MTO social media platforms.
I hope to one day see people look past arbitrary notions of “the other”… and realize that we all have differences, and nothing can define us except us. Bernis Joel Rusk, Student at Okanagan College, Canada
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Summit celebrating Arts and Social Change
The Zoom panel discussion featuring a Q&A with the film's Director and Co-Producer, Shidan Majidi, several cast members - Celia, Hussain, Kit, Taylor, Veronica - and soundtrack composer, Levi Taylor, along with the panel moderators, Steve Vinson, Sanam Arab, and Jane Berliss-Vincent, and emcee of the virtual event, Pedro Coracides.
