Five students from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette will be at the international Cannes Film Festival later this month. Associate Professor Dr. Lucy Henke with the Marketing and Hospitality Department will also be in attendance.
Marketing students Aimee Lemaire, John Petersen, Ann Horton and Chris Wilks will be among 18 students worldwide participating in the American Pavilion International Business Program while Communications graduate student Saad Khan is among 139 students participating in the American Pavilion Worldwide Student Program. Henke will serve as a mentor to interns with the business program.
“ Students will be participating in roundtable discussions, workshops and meetings with people in the film industry,” said Henke. “I really think this experience will be a payoff for the university and for Lafayette and Louisiana.”
As a mentor, she will be assisting with student activities, tours, speakers and roundtable discussions. She will also help with job assignments and student evaluations.
The marketing students will be placed as interns with The Weinstein Company, Dennis Davidson & Associates and other Marche du Film companies.
Henke has been collaborating with Lafayette Entertainment Initiative via an ongoing Entertainment Marketing course at UL Lafayette to promote and develop the local industry. Both she and LEI’s Marcus Brown are preparing the marketing interns to assist in promoting Lafayette and Louisiana’s entertainment industry resources while fulfilling their internship duties at Cannes.
A local delegation is expected to visit the film festival this year with hopes of having a larger, strategic presence at the event in 2009.
Khan, in addition to being a part of the American Pavilion Worldwide Student Program, will be showing his short film Another Kind of Black.
“ It is unbelievably exciting to be a part of this,” he said. “It is a terrific feeling to be a part of the festival as a student intern as well as having a short film screened at Cannes. I couldn't be more satisfied at this point.”
The students and Henke will be leaving next week and returning May 26.