|ngenius said:
@Villain: I'm gonna get Requiem For A Dream and Princess Mononoke. Just because you recommend them!!!
And I'm frankly interested on that work with kids you've been telling us about these years, I would like to do something like that, but I don't know where to start from.
Whoa!
Very well, first about the movies: Princess Mononoke I can easily recommend to you - I'm pretty damn sure you, of all people, will enjoy and appreciate it. Requiem for a Dream is a bit more risky - you might either love it or hate it. It is certainly rather challenging, almost painful to watch; and despite what I wrote above in my previous post, I doubt I will ever show it to the youngsters I work with. There
is a message in the movie that I would like to make those kids think about - but I'm just afraid they would concentrate on other things in the movie instead.
It kind of reminds me of an experience a few years ago, when I was working (as a part of my studies) with a class of so-called "10th graders", ie. kids who had done so badly in school (for various reasons) that they couldn't get into any new school for secondary education when their compulsory schooling ended at 9th grade. They were 16-17 years old, some with good motivation and clear plans for themselves (raise their scores so that they could get into the kind of school they wanted), some with no motivation at all and only a bleak future ahead.
We (I had three fellow students working with me on this project) were supposed to motivate them, make them work better as a group (as they barely knew each other in the class) and handle various issues that came up during the year (bullying, drug-abuse and a couple of suicide-attempts to name a few of those issues).
At one point, we heard that there had been some racism-related problems in the class (one of the guys was dark-skinned). Thus, we decided to do something about it. I came up with the idea of showing "American History X" to them - I thought it was a great movie with a deep and well-thought anti-racist theme, and characters that were easy to empathise with. I guess I should have thought about it a second time.
We made the following plan: First we'll show them the movie; second we'll make them write their thoughts about it (some of them badly needed practice in their writing-skills); and last we'll discuss about it all together. These were to happen in consecutive days, so that they would have plenty of time to think about the movie. The first two parts went seemingly well, and I started thinking about some questions for the third part, while reading the papers they had just written about the movie.
Then I came up with a paper from one of the "good girls" of the class - one with good motivation and the mental resources to go anywhere she wanted (I recall her reason for being in the class was because she had been sick a lot during the previous year and hadn't then even tried to get into any school, knowing that she could score better). I can't remember the exact content of her paper, but it went something like this:
"It was a boring movie. The only good scene in the movie was when he killed the my pals. First he shot the idiot my pals and then he put the head of the other my pals against the sidewalk and stomped! That's the way to deal with those filthy my pals!"
I have rarely felt so disgusted with anything related to my work.
The moral of the story: To some people, some stories don't appear in the same way they do to you, no matter what kind of moral you perceive in them.
-Villain
