Elevating through film

Assistant professor transforms faculty work into impactful documentaries

By Kennesaw State University

April 16^th, 2025

For his documentary film work, Sangsun Choi has ventured into impoverished areas before, but not like those in Kampala, the capital of Uganda.

The Banda slum, one of the poorest in Kampala, served as the backdrop for Choi’s portrayal of a child living with sickle cell disease. The film effort fills a role within a larger interdisciplinary project at Kennesaw State University which seeks to develop an affordable medical device that can measure stroke risk in pediatric sickle cell disease and, in the long term, create a community-based screening program.

Led by biomedical engineering professor Paul Lee, the project involves seven faculty members across five colleges at KSU, including Choi, an assistant professor of communication in the Radow College of Humanities and Social Sciences; Monica Swahn, dean of the Wellstar College of Health and Human Services; and faculty from the College of Computing and Software Engineering and the Coles College of Business.

It’s funded by the Office of Research through a $200,000 interdisciplinary seed grant. The team hopes this leads to more than $1 million in external grant funding.

Lee said Choi plays a vital role in the “MULISA” project. The acronym stands for “mHealth-enabled User-friendly Light-based Stroke Screening and Assessment in Pediatric Sickle Cell Disease in Uganda,” but the word “mulisa” also means “to illuminate” in Luganda, one of the major languages of Uganda.

“The documentary supports and amplifies what we are doing in an emotional way,” said Lee, who served as the producer. “The audience will be able to immediately understand what type of work we want to do and why we want to do it and how valuable it is. This has more impact than just reading a scientific research paper.”

Choi has uplifted the research and talents of KSU faculty in other ways. In a vastly different discipline, he created a short film about nuevo tango, a fusion of traditional tango elements with jazz, classical and other musical influences. It was a collaboration with music professor and cellist Jesús Castro-Balbi. Under Choi’s direction, students have also flourished, creating and assisting with award-winning projects.

“There are so many talented researchers and artists on campus,” said Choi, in his third year teaching at KSU. “Their expertise, their stories are enough for me to start a documentary project. The faculty here are inspiring, and I really value the collaboration with them, but also my students.”

Lee and Choi stand on a road in Kampala, Uganda.

Making research accessible

Mable, the main subject of Choi’s documentary on sickle cell disease, is an optimistic 16-year-old girl who relies on faith and singing gospel to guide her through the physical pain brought on by the stigmatized condition, but also the extreme poverty that crams her eight-person family into a 7-foot by 4-foot room and makes it impossible to afford painkillers from the overrun hospital nearby.

“I wanted to focus on this family’s courage and how they’re able to overcome their challenges, as warriors,” Choi said. “I truly respected their wonderful attitude, how they never give up, whether it’s Mable’s single mother, who never gave up her kids despite the financial struggle, or Mable, living with a physical illness.”

“Chicken Ghetto,” the forthcoming documentary named after Mable’s nickname, will be the first of a series of short films. Each will explore the project from a unique angle, serving to engage and educate the community beyond immediate stakeholders, such as patient families and clinicians.

Choi’s documentary work also elevated Lee’s own understanding of the disease, having the chance to see the daily struggles of those impacted up close and who would benefit most from his engineering innovation, a noninvasive device that doesn’t require trained personnel to operate it.

“I don’t know how I could have gotten those precious personal stories if I didn't get involved in the documentary filmmaking,” Lee said. “It was an amazing experience that refreshed me as a human being and broadened my capability.”

Swahn, who has been working in Uganda for the past 15-plus years, said Choi’s short film is a brilliant component to the overall project. Now in the midst of a five-year project funded by the National Institutes of Health that aims to teach vocational skills to women, Swahn was able to provide logistical support and a home base for Choi and Lee. She helped orchestrate the working group of involved faculty members.

“As a trained epidemiologist, I look at numbers, biostatistics,” Swahn said. “I always think you can tell the story with numbers, and of course that's a very important part of the story, but many people really only resonate with a personal narrative – the colors, the pictures, people speaking firsthand about the hardship they have.”

Staging KSU talent

From working with a biomedical engineering researcher on a public health study, Choi had to shift gears a bit for a concurrent project.

Choi was in South Korea a couple of summers ago when he received a message from Castro-Balbi regarding a project called Communities of Tango, which has spotlighted not only the music of tango, but the community that has existed alongside it for over a century. The project would involve musical performances as well as a documentary film.

“Musicians tell stories through sound, right? And filmmakers tell stories through images and sounds,” Castro-Balbi said. “For me it's an interesting exploration and adventure to see how two storytellers can come together and become interested in advocating for the genre of tango.”

In 2022, the Bailey School of Music hosted a Hispanic Heritage Festival and invited Daniel Binelli to perform with the KSU Symphony Orchestra. An Argentine composer, Binelli is considered a high priest of tango music and performs on an accordion-like instrument called the bandoneon. He performed a duet with Castro-Balbi. All the while, Choi trained his lens on the proceedings and produced the seven-minute documentary film “Castro-Balbi & Nuevo Tango.”

Choi and Castro-Balbi sit in Morgan Hall in the Bailey Performance Center at Kennesaw State University.

The film received a viewing in March 2025 at the American Documentary and Animation Film Festival, an Oscar-qualifying festival, in Palm Springs, California. AmDocs ranks in the top 1% of more than 12,000 film festivals in the world.

But Castro-Balbi said it had an impact closer to home.

“This project has already connected people in ways that are important for a large university like Kennesaw State,” Castro-Balbi said. “It's really important that we continue to hear and tell those stories, and that's ultimately the goal – the more we learn about tango communities, the more effectively I think we can educate students and prepare them for the world.”

Choi said KSU truly incubated this collaboration. He derives inspiration from the artists and researchers he encounters every day on campus, an environment rife with possibilities.

“The benefit of working at KSU is that there are so many inspiring colleagues, and they are doing their dynamic work research and artwork,” Choi said. “At the same time, they are open-minded people who think about how to spread their work, and because of that, it’s a dynamic and wonderful environment for me to find subject matter on the campus.”

Guiding future filmmakers

Apart from collaborations with faculty, Choi regularly provides students with hands-on experience in filmmaking.

“I don't want to make my students stay on the campus, so I often think about how I can get them involved in more practical production experiences,” he said.

He has mentored more than a dozen students so far in the First-Year Scholars program, involving students in his personal filmmaking on a variety of subjects. Every semester, Choi also requires his students to create public service announcement videos on public issues, which are submitted in competitions, like the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Red Ribbon Campus Video PSA Contest.

Last year, environmental science major and President’s Emerging Global Scholar Nelly Koz and several other students assisted Choi with an award-winning documentary, “About a Bowshot Away,” as part of their First-Year Scholars project. Screened at top-tier, Oscar-qualifying film festivals and aired through PBS, the documentary conveyed the role of archery in one Korean immigrant family living in metro Atlanta. Students also engaged in film analysis, editing, using innovative filmmaking equipment, such as drones, and creating their own documentary.

“The process of making the documentary taught us things we would have never learned just from a lecture,” Koz said. “Hands-on experience is essential in the film industry. His teaching style was very student-centered and progressive in a way that he encouraged us to think critically while still being a resource when we got stuck.”

Choi stands with students on set for "About a Bowshot Away."

Media and entertainment student Brianna Barros, whose team secured the first-place win in the DEA video contest last year, said Choi’s approach to teaching as more of an advisor, rather than instructor was helpful. He was also a cheerleader through the capstone project.

“It was amazing to know that someone believed in us and our work and truly believed that we could win a competition like this,” Barros said. “Winning the competition and going to Boston to present at the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators conference was a huge boost to my professional development skills, and we never would have accomplished what we did on this trip without him.”

Choi said that as an educator, he feels most rewarded when he witnesses his students succeed.

“When I was a filmmaking student, I wanted to have this kind of opportunity, but I couldn't have it at all,” Choi said. “Because of that experience, I know what students need for their growth.”