The third piece to this most incredible journey will be film. There is a list of films that can be used for the project in the bibliography in the back of this unit. These are films that I found fairly easily, and you may want to use others. Each of the films was chosen with the itinerary in mind. The films will give students a visual glimpse of each of the areas where we stop, becoming worlds in which students will study another culture and reflect on where we are going and where we have been. For our stop in Beijing, for example, I have chosen the film, The Last Emperor. This film gives a spectacular view of the Forbidden City at the time of the emperor, Pu Yi. I will not show the entire film to my eighth graders, but will show parts of it to them, especially the scene when the young boy emperor is greeted by thousands of subjects. Again it is up to you how you use the film. In some cases you may just give students a glimpse of the movie, while in others the entire film may be shown. Since we are trying to focus on geography in this seminar, I am trying to show films that will give students a glimpse of what the landscape or the city we are studying looks like.
