New York Times Article on the Festival

Teenagers Share Their Vision in a Film Festival

By Julie Flaherty
November 20, 2000
The New York Times
Copyright © 2000, The New York Times Company

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Nov.19- Many of the stories are like pages from a diary. In a video titled "Communication Gap," a young woman tries to interview her father about their tense relationship, but ends up with the camera on herself, crying in the bathroom mirror.
Another video in this weekend's festival of work produced by teenagers was called "Trapped: The Mind of a Gangster." It follows a New York teenager from gang initiation to prison term. At the end, the camera pulls back to reveal the narrator in a wheelchair, the outcome of a shootout.

"It shocked everybody," said Charly Clerge, a veteran of the film festival at 18. He added, with a nod of understanding. "That is what happens when you go with a gang."

While not candidates for prime- time, the videos made it to the big screen this weekend, in the "Do It Your Damn Self! National Youth Video and Film Festival." The festival is a showcase for commercials, documentaries, music videos and dramas, produced by teenagers, that otherwise would not make it to the theaters.

The festival was created in 1996 by students at the Community Art Center, a nonprofit group in Cambridge that is host to after-school programs for young people, including some who live in two nearby housing projects.

A group of girls, having learned something about working with a camera at the center, wanted to see videos like theirs at local theaters. So they wrote a grant proposal and raised the money to rent a theater for a night.

Today, the 50 members of the center's Teen Media Program still run the show, now held at a campus theater borrowed from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This year they screened 184 submissions from around the country and chose 25 for the program, including some from Detroit, Los Angeles, New York City, Portland, Me., and Vancouver, Wash.

"A lot of these kids just never do get out of their neighborhoods," said Susan Richards Scott, the center's executive director. "This gives them a larger world. They feel like they are part of something bigger."

Joseph Douillette, the media program director, said the creative jolt the teenagers got from seeing works of their peers was second only to meeting the movie crews themselves.

"They realize that there is a person behind a piece, and it's not just an electronic signal," Mr. Douillette said. "You see names at the end, but it's just like a line on the screen until you actually meet the person."

Those out-of-town producers who could raise the money flew in for the weekend (an airline donated some of the tickets) and mingled with their audience over cake and ice cream after the screening Saturday night.

Emily Green, an 18-year-old from Wilmette, a suburb of Chicago, said this was her first festival, and she was "scared to death" to present her work. Her black-and-white video was a personal narrative about her parents' divorce, and her father's revelation that he was gay.

Her video, the last to screen on Saturday, caught the attention of an aspiring filmmaker from South Boston, who accosted her after the show to discuss the film.

"I just took the camera and started talking into it," Ms. Green explained. "I didn't know it would be so therapeutic."

Her young admirer, Kim LaForge, 16, said she understood, and told how the death of her best friend had led her to make a video about suicide."Everyone doubted me, but I thought it would really help," Ms. LaForge said. "I felt much better after I got it done."

While Ms. LaForge's video did not make it into the show, she watched the other films with relish.

There are so many different techniques that we haven't done," she said. "I'm going to get my aunts video camera and do a documentary." In fact, several teenagers were walking around with a camera, chronicling the festival itself.

The festival originally had "inner city" as part of its title, but the teenagers in Cambridge voted to open it to producers from rural areas or anyplace that would not have the space, or the acceptance, to show films by young people.

The various works included a music video set on cattle ranch in New Mexico and a poetic documentary on female genital mutilation, submitted by a New York group.

Most of the videos evolved from classroom or after-school projects, and some of the edges are painfully rough, with scratchy soundtracks and shaky cameras. But Mr. Douillette, the media director, said that the technical side was the last thing he taught his own students. He sees the video camera as just an excuse to explore.

"The Society of Engineers asked one group to do a video, and now they all want to be engineers," he said with a laugh. "But that's great. I'm almost proud to say none of these kids want to be video producers."