Frosh

Freshman year: What could be more challenging, disorienting, exhilarating, or 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 cinéma vérité 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 queer identity on a predominantly 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. A contemporary American coming-of-age story, Frosh stands as a classic portrait 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 higher education. Ideal for use in freshman year orientation, residential life, counseling, student activities programs, and training for professional and paraprofessional staff.