The story follows Mitch, who after yet another breakup, gets intervened on by his closest friends and steered towards therapy as an option to break his various self-sabotaging cycles. Battling his problems with communication, fear, depression, and anxiety, Mitch reaches a breaking point and in a moment of impulsivity he adopts a miniature horse that has dwarfism and anxiety issues. The film stars Gary Busey and the writer, Jacques Belliveau.
The film, Reggie: A Millennial Depression Comedy will be screened in Peeler Crystal Lounge on Wednesday, November 16 at 6:30 p.m. On Thursday, three sections of Catawba’s The Pursuit program will come together for a discussion with Belliveau. He will discuss the making of his film with the students. In addition, he’ll provide tips for drafting and filming ten-minute screenplay based on the hero’s journey.
Belliveau is a standup comedian who has performed at Second City Theater in Chicago. He is a member of two sketch groups, “The Sloan” and “The Rabbit Bros,” and he’s founded the stand-up variety show collective, “Comics at Fault,” where he’s produced over 250 standup comedy showcases across the country.
Belliveau is the second featured speaker of a new humanities-based scholarship program at Catawba College called The Pursuit, which is supported by the Teagle Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Launched this academic year, first-year students receive a scholarship to participate in a two-course sequence that asks students to engage with transformative texts and the humanities as they pursue some of the most important human questions—questions that will inform and transcend their future professional life. The first course in the sequence offered this fall asks students to contemplate, “The Hero’s Journey,” and how myths, fables, and religious texts both shape and reflect culture, community, and individual identity. The students examine heroic figures as they grapple with big questions such as, “What is happiness?”, “What does it mean to be successful?”, and “How do you lead a good life—a life of purpose, virtue, and fulfillment?”
In the spring semester, students turn those questions toward their future area of study (Business, Health Science and Human Performance, or Environmental and Natural Science). Students will contextualize their professional aspirations within the broader range of society, culture, and the human experience. Students will immerse themselves in the questions that philosophers, historians, and cultural critics pose towards science- and business-driven progress, in the process sharpening their own understanding of their future majors from an interdisciplinary and well-rounded angle.
