Documentary by Watts ’25 featured in QC Times

Students in Augustana’s film program are making headlines.

First, a film by Matthew Chezum  ’25 of New Windsor, Ill., won Audience Choice awards at a campus screening and at the 2024 Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival. 

More recently, Emma Watts  ’25 of Rock Falls, Ill., was featured in the Quad-City Times for a short documentary she’s producing.  

Watts’ documentary, with the working title “Voices from the Dark,” focuses on the stories of the radium girls, a group of factory workers who ingested potentially deadly amounts of radium while working at the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Ill., in the 1920s and 1930s.

Watts hopes to shed light on the stories of the Ottawa radium girls beyond what the public already knows, and to seek justice by reporting what happened.

“The suffering they endured is inhumane,” Watts told the Quad-City Times. “These women did not deserve to die.”

Watts is a film and theatre performance double major. Augustana’s film program is relatively new. Stacy Barton, the program’s director, was hired in August 2022 to create the program from the ground up. Students began declaring film majors and minors at the start of the 2023-2024 academic year.

“Stacy Barton has been a huge help with this project, and has been guiding and supporting me the entire time,” Watt said.

Read more about Watts' filmmaking journey in the Quad-City Times.