This issue of POVwinona wraps up our 2018 Winona State Film Series. Film students have worked hard promoting the university theme of resilience through films and this issue provides student perspectives on the Resilience Film Series.

Interpersonal relationships were key to the Resilience Film Series

Starting things off, Brynn Artley connects four films from the series with a specific perspective of resilience–that one must fall in order to display resilience by getting back up. Brynn discusses how the series naturally started to form around childhood resilience after the first film in the series was chosen. Morghan Lemmenes and Joe Van Ryn team up to explore how the series encompassed the idea that everyone has the ability to overcome adversity and move forward in life. They discuss that the films left the audience with an improved sense of resilience and that everyone has to ability to active resilience.  Next, Seth Lamey examines how “Adverse Childhood Experiences” force children to rely on resilience to overcome toxic stress through the main characters in Moonlight, Eighth Grade, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, and A Quiet Place. The world the characters lived in required them to activate resilience in order to survive. Finally, in collaboration, Brittney Bluhm and Maeve O’Duggan discuss how resilience is shown in two aspects of the child’s dependency on a parental figure: one is for support and guidance, and the other is in times of conflict and hardship. These dependencies change based on the social pressures and conflict the child and adult characters experience.

We thank you for your participation in reading this film criticism and analysis–and for exploring resilience in our 2018 Film Series. Changes are on the way with a re-design to our POVwinona blogsite, but don’t worry: you will still be able to find our next issue soon, looking back at the classic period of the action-adventure genre.