The Desert of Forbidden Art, a documentary by USC School of Cinematic Arts professor Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev MFA ’00, received a full-page article and a strong review in The New York Times earlier this month and has had its run extended in Manhattan for a third week.

In Los Angeles, the documentary was featured in the Los Angeles Times on March 13 and received a glowing review by Kenneth Turan, which can be seen at tinyurl.com/4k5ctvn

The film began a week-long engagement at three Laemmle theatres – the Monica, Sunset and Fallbrook – that will continue through Friday. Each theatre will be showing the film several times each day.

The Long and Short of It

The short film has been the cornerstone for aspiring storytellers at the USC School of Cinematic Arts since the school was founded.

This year, at the Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival in central France, the university crossed a milestone in the medium by representing 10 percent of the American films at the world’s largest international short film market.

USC has had a presence at the Clermont-Ferrand market since 1989 and has had a dramatic increase in participation in the past five years.

Held in February each year, the festival attracts around 3,000 professionals from around the world looking for short films. This year, 65 projects from USC students and alumni were included in the event.

Two School of Cinematic Arts-related films have secured sales in Japan, 10 have secured sale for Italian broadcast and other sales are pending.

Fellowship Research Coming to Town & Gown

Nearly 60 graduate fellows from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering will present their work at the third annual USC Annenberg Graduate Fellowship Program Research and Creative Project Symposium on April 5.

The event will feature electronic displays, interactive games and short films that highlight the research and creative work currently undertaken at USC. The symposium also will showcase the work of interdisciplinary teams that came together as a result of the program’s networking opportunities.

Presentations will begin at 1:30 p.m. at Town & Gown. A reception and informal discussion will be held from 3:30 until 5 p.m. The event is free and open to graduate students, faculty and staff.

For more information, contact Meredith Drake Reitan at mereditd@usc.edu.

Astor Wins Award for School Violence Research

The Society for Social Work and Research gave its 2011 Excellence in Research Award to USC School of Social Work professor Ron Astor for his study on school violence in Israel schools.

Astor, the school’s Richard M. and Ann L. Thor Professor of Urban Social Development, won the award for the article “School Violence and Theoretically Atypical Schools: The Principal’s Centrality in Orchestrating Safe Schools,” which was published in the American Educational Research Journal.

Each year, the society gives the Excellence in Research Award to one article that it considers the best of that year.

Astor’s study, which was co-authored with doctoral candidate Jose Nunez Estrada and Rami Benbenishty of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, examined nine “atypical” schools in Israel that report little campus violence despite being located in violent communities.

The research team determined that the most important variable in these schools was the leadership and that principals who emphasized school reform were the most successful in keeping violence at bay.

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