VHS and DVD
98 minutes, 1993 Producer/Directors: Dayna Goldfine, Dan Geller An online FACILITATOR GUIDE is available for this title.
ABOUT THE FILM
Freshman year. What could be more challenging, disorienting, exhilarating, depressing?
Two award-winning filmmakers- one male, one female- returned to college with their cameras. They spent a year living in a co-ed, multicultural, freshman residence hall at Stanford University. They shot at 2:00 AM bull sessions, in co-ed bathrooms, classrooms and deans offices, and on trips home during winter break. Their unprecedented cinema verite documentary captures the freshman world of scary freedoms and new lifestyles in all its thrilling anxiety.
The students discover they face much more than the traditional academic pressures. Campus life is wracked with unexpected social conflicts:
Freedom of speech vs. anti-harassment codes
Multicultural education vs. western culture
Alcohol, drugs, and dating
Grade anxiety, cultural alienation, and the lure of dropping out
Maintaining ethnic and gay identity on a white, heterosexual campus
Frosh traces a dramatic journey of social experimentation and intellectual curiosity, cultural clashes and spiritual crisis, academic pressure and adjustment problems, but ultimately, individual self-discovery within a diverse community. Nothing less than a contemporary American coming of age story, Frosh is destined to become a classic of student life.
Frosh's frank and open approach to gender, racial, political, and academic issues common to all campuses will help prepare any student for the challenges of college life. Ideal for use in: Freshman year, residential life, counseling, and other student activities programs, and for training professional and para-professional staff.
"A fascinating portrayal of the freshman year experience. An intimate look at real students living and working together. Beautifully dramatizes the importance of students and peers and of residential life."
Alexander W. Astin, UCLA, author of What Matters in College? Four Critical Years Revisited
"Presents college life in a way that parents, students and staff can understand. Its realism makes it a unique resource for education, training and staff development. Campus life as it really is."
W. Garry Johnson, Association of College and University Housing Officers
"Frosh vividly, candidly and sympathetically documents the passage from adolescence to young adulthood. These students touch you as they struggle to develop intellectual and social competance, manage their sexual and aggressive emotions, and test and sometimes modify the values of their heritages."
Robert Rogers, Ohio State University
"Captures virtually all the essential themes of the residential freshman year experience...Highly recommended."
John N. Gardner, Director, National Resource Center for the Freshman Year Experience
"Engaging and well-observed. Frosh fascinates in its reflection of the shifting 1990s cultural landscape."
