Participating in their first year of film at Hockaday, freshmen Anika Kapoor and Anu Akingbade responded to the prompt, “What does consent look like to you?” and won the seventh annual film festival hosted by the North Texas Alliance to Reduce Unintended Pregnancy in Teens. Known as NTARUPT, the film festival encourages the voice of younger generations in conversations surrounding health education.

Kapoor and Akingbade took part in a live interview at the festival, sharing the purpose of their film and its personal significance.

“I think what really struck us as something that is often unheard is the aftermath and the conversation that victims often have with themselves after such a thing occurs,” Kapoor said.

Kapoor and Akingbade depicted these conversations using both of their voices to narrate their character’s thoughts. Wishing to represent the psychology of a victim, both voices try to process and debate the emotional damage caused. They also filmed visuals of a faucet dripping and clothes thrown onto a floor to interrupt the character’s perspective.

Film students Lucy Roberts ’22, Helen Railsback ’24, Gabriela Gaona ’25, Gretchen Jones ’25, Naviya Reddy ’25, Ashlynn Gaffney ’25, Anika Kapoor ’25 and Anu Akingbade ’25 all submitted their responses to the competition and were accepted as finalists by the NTARUPT judging panel.

Two weeks after their entries, all the films were screened at The Kessler Theater on March 27. Amidst hundreds of competitors, freshmen Kapoor and Akingbade won the entire competition, and senior Roberts’ film won an honorable mention. 

Professional filmmakers and students from schools in Dallas judge each film for technical merit and conceptual accuracy. Allowing other teenagers to weigh in provides contrasting and unbiased opinions from the age level that conversations of consent affect the most.

“Our donors need to hear it, our city needs to hear it, everyone needs to hear the point of view of young people,” NTARPT founder Terry Greenberg said.

NTARUPT hosts panels, conferences and the film festival to educate teenagers who lack proper health education in their schools. A 1980 Hockaday graduate and CEO of NTARUPT, Greenberg said she hopes to remove the stigma surrounding conversations about sexual education and teenagers’ discomfort regarding those conversations.

“I feel like all kids deserve the same health education that Hockaday provided me with, not just privileged ones,”   Greenburg said.

Greenberg created the film festival to provide an outlet for students to share their knowledge of these topics through art. Each year, the festival provides a prompt or theme students must follow, using film as their medium.

Following the success of the seventh annual film festival, NTARUPT hopes to welcome new forms of art next year in the teenage category, including studio art and photography.

Kapoor hopes to return to next year’s festival and experience the welcoming environment once again.

“Overall, I really enjoyed watching the variety of the films and how fun the atmosphere was this year,” she said.