Since April this semester, for two months, more than 200 IVECA students from India and Korea have been working together to prepare for a youth international virtual festival promoting creative works. Last week, the festival started as students presented creative works such as movies and literature from their countries and discussed the themes and ideas introduced in those works.
The international festival was not only to show creative works to each other for enjoyment. Besides learning about each other's cultures, the event aimed to highlight the relevance of the creative works with some of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (#SDGs) and understand how creative works can help raise awareness about the SDGs locally and globally.
Students found that the creative works they worked on can be related to many Sustainable Development Goals, including Gender Equality, Quality Education, Reduced Inequalities, and many others. For example, a student from Korea shared that the director of the drama "Itaewon Class" intends to fight against an unreasonable society toward #SDG10, Reduced Inequalities. He added, "the solution of the gap between the rich and the poor in SDG10 can instill a desirable perception in people, by the appearance of the protagonist who protected small businesses from the tyranny of large companies". Indian students found that the movie "Dangal" is related to #SDG5 Gender Equality. They shared, "the movie is about a patriotic fighter who evolved his daughters into World Class Fighters."
Inspired by the presentations at the festival, A Korean student expressed, "I was able to learn the mindset of not giving up until the end and felt that I need to work hard to achieve my goals." One Indian student commented, "Through the Korean students' presentations, I got to learn about Korean culture and cinema. I also learned that social events can be shown through films as these works are the mirror of society".
This virtual festival allowed students to engage their international friends using their unique elucidation of the creative works. To do so, some Indian students made their own inspirational videos to introduce their homeland's creative work and the SDGs reflected in the work. The following example video presents students' insights on their society addressing gender inequality in their movie: