By Jennifer K. Morita

November 20, 2024

The Sacramento State College of Business will host a film festival Nov. 21 in Hinde Auditorium featuring four student-produced comedies exploring emotional intelligence in management.

The event will be livestreamed, and already viewers from 24 countries have signed up to tune in, Professor of Management Hakan Ozcelik said.

“It’s not just a campus event,” he said. “It has become a global event.”

Sacramento State business students have been participating in this film festival for 14 years, making it one of the few schools in the world with this approach to human resources and management, according to Ozcelik.

“It’s an arts-based approach to management education,” he said. “In addition to the cognitive aspects, we’re not just looking at words and sentences and paragraphs, but also what students see and hear and what they imagine to bring different stories together to understand different theories and different concepts about management, which is all about people.”

Ozcelik’s former student Corrin Mattos teaches Ozcelik’s human resources management students how to edit film, and local actress Elizabeth Nunziato gives them a class on acting. Students team up to write, film and edit eight-minute films that each tell a story about a specific management theory.

The process helps students to better understand the material they are learning in class.

“They have to unpack the theory and will start understanding the nuances of that theory so they learn it for a lifetime,” Ozcelik said. “More than that, they also bring an emotional voice to the theory, developing characters who have a conflict that leads to resolution.”

Ozcelik pointed out that these student filmmakers will be the future human resource managers.

“HR is filled with videos for online trainings and role plays, so all of these skills we’re equipping our students with have become almost essential now,” he said.

Nunziato and Oguzhan Aygoren, director of the Innovation Institute at UC Berkeley, will provide commentary on each film. After an interactive forum with the audience, a jury panel will choose the best film.

The student films will also be uploaded to the Organizational Wisdom Studio’s YouTube channel at a later date.

Admission to the College of Business Film Festival is free. The screening begins at 5:30 p.m. Register to attend the event in person by filling out this online form by Nov. 20, or to receive a Zoom link to livestream the festival, visit here.