UA Graduate Student’s Eternal Screens Free at Tuscaloosa’s Bama Theatre

Joshua Miller’s Eternal will move from graduate work into a public-facing Tuscaloosa premiere when the MFA thesis film screens free at the Bama Theatre on Friday, April 17, at 7 p.m. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the cast and crew, turning the event into more than a simple class project showing and giving the film a full community debut at 600 Greensboro Ave.

The placement matters because Eternal is being presented as an MFA thesis film by a University of Alabama graduate student, not as a private campus-only exercise. A free screening at the Bama Theatre opens the project to students, filmmakers and regular moviegoers alike, and it puts a thesis film in the same public circuit as the city’s other arts programming. In a town where campus and downtown culture often overlap, that kind of venue choice gives an emerging filmmaker a real exhibition moment.

Miller’s path to that moment already runs through multiple parts of the University of Alabama creative community. The UA Department of Art and Art History announced his Master of Arts thesis exhibition in the Sella-Granata Art Gallery last year, with work on view from March 3 through March 7, 2025, and a reception on March 6. His biography says he moved to Tuscaloosa in 2023 to pursue an MFA in Visual Art while teaching undergraduates in the UA art department. It also says he earned a bachelor’s degree in film production with a minor in screenwriting from Webster University.

That background helps explain why Eternal reads as a larger career marker, not just a single screening. Miller has already been building work in Tuscaloosa across academic and teaching settings, and the Bama Theatre premiere gives that work a public stage with a familiar local address and a built-in audience conversation afterward. For Alabama independent film, the event is a clear example of how a student project can be launched into civic view through a historic venue, a university program and a free screening that makes the film accessible on one of downtown Tuscaloosa’s busiest arts nights.