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Keeping It Reel

A review of a youth film festival

By Allison Lee

Friday, May 24th marked the fourth annual Youth-made Media Festival, "Keeping it Reel" featuring videos, films, and live performances at SFMOMA for youth, by youth. "Keeping it Reel" provides a venue for young adults to have their voices heard.

This film festival, still in its early years of development, seemed to attract a diverse teenage audience, which nearly filled the theatre. Young artists from organizations and high schools all over the Bay Area including Urban Roots Media, the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, National Latina Health Organization, and Youth in Action, came to present their work.

Each of the 16 presentations inspired me in a different way. The first video, called "People Look At Me," was a short documentary of youth being interviewed in black in white about the stereotypes they face from day to day. The second part of the video was in color and the same people re-assert their true selves in a more positive light. Some youth chose to express themselves from a serious perspective, while others tried to get a laugh out of the audience.

A video called "Down Hill Skating" by Eric Thorpe and Joanna Hock, simply capture on film what they love to do most — skating. It was interesting how something so simple could translate into a piece of art. My eyes followed their hypnotic moves across the screen as these guys gracefully slid down steep streets and wound around bends in one incredible, captivating, continuous motion.

A more serious film was called "Ten Times a Day." This video followed a boy who encounters several forms of frustration and rejection in a day. He gets to the point where he pulls a gun out of his drawer. At the same instant, he finds a guitar sale advertisement and chooses the thin green piece of paper over the heavy metal gun. It is easy to see that between these two forms of escape, one is constructive while the other destructive.

Some artists took an activist approach by informing their audience. One piece in particular was called, "HP on Fire." These filmmakers expressed their concern for a widely disregarded environmental crisis in Hunters Point. Residents articulate their distress over feeling suffocated both by a fire which occurred in a nearby naval shipyard a few years ago, and by the fact that they are being pushed aside into a corner for society to forget about.

My favorite video was called "The Good Deed." I thought this film paid the most attention to symbolic detail. It starts out with a Latino teenager in a gardener uniform ostracized by "normal" teens his age. As he clips the hedges, he gazes into a basketball court, past the barbed wire fence, which separates him as an outsider from the boys playing ball inside. When he takes his lunch break, a cell phone goes off in a forgotten purse, and all of a sudden, this outsider is sucked into a dilemma by the power of technology. I interviewed the filmmaker, Jake Bradbury, an 18-year-old from Berkeley High School, who was inspired by this story in the newspaper two months ago. In the end, the Latino boy goes all the way across town to deliver the purse for $50, which he won't get, as the girl who bribed him yells "rape," and her brother-in-law shoots him. Bradbury makes his final statement at the shot of the gun: "Don't make stupid decisions," he warns.

After watching so many videos in a row, I would normally walk out of a movie theatre a little removed from reality. But this time, because of the intense content and true talent of these young filmmakers, I walked out of the theatre a little more informed, a little uprooted from my isolated world.

For Youth Radio, I'm Allison Lee.