Jennifer Reeder’s little masterpiece about a substitute teacher’s classroom crisis is swirling with so many complex emotions. The film manages to be dark, funny, sad, honest, and ultimately hopeful all at the same time. Just like teenagers 😉

The title of the series comes from a Peter Tosh/Bob Marley tune which reminds us that young people are not to blame for the state of the world. They inherit the lessons and behaviors we give to them.

Much of my adult life has been spent working with young people of all ages. Over the years I’ve realized that being around children and young adults keeps me positive and hopeful about the future. Without them it’s all doom and gloom, in my universe.

So, to start us off on our journey this month, I’m featuring a film by a 16-year old Syrian filmmaker named Muna, one member of the innovative ANOTHER KIND OF GIRL COLLECTIVE. The group was formed in Jordan in 2015 by the documentary filmmaker Laura Doggett.

All the young filmmakers in the collective are refugees living in flux in Jordan, many in refugee camps. Despite the dire and bleak conditions they are living, the films are filled with so much beauty, wonder, and hope. They take their bare surroundings and imagine such colorful, rich, and boundless times ahead.

DREAMS WITHOUT BORDERS by Muna / Another Kind of Girl Collective

anotherkindofgirl.com

Karissa Hahn, Before The Portrait, 2012, 2:12 min.

Crawling through the piles of shit, tits scraping bottom, cuts and bruises, you come to a realization.

This isn’t the end. The feelings won’t last. You will have to carry onward and there will be so. much. more. pain.

But, right now, it doesn’t matter. You’re a fly AF mermaid.

Thanks again to Echo Park Film Center and Kate Lain. If I am ever asked back, my follow up program will be THE PLEASURES OF BEING A GHOST.

…because aren’t we all waiting for something good.

Goodbye Forever 🙂

Thirza Cuthand, Through the Looking Glass, 1999, 14 min.

First off, congratulations! You have endured the teenage years – that tenuous time where survival questionable, especially if you are one of those people without a set place. So, maybe I should say CONGRATS are in order to all those folks.

(I never said you came out unscathed, but you’re here.)

Moving past the foundational years (which seem like a cruel joke because people are constantly pulling the ground out from under your feet) you are welcomed to a regimented world where you are told to fall in line.

Definitions abound and you are hailed to picks sides to define yourself in various ways. RED or WHITE. BLACK or BLUE.

Dedicated to those who unabashedly refuse to erase their multi-faceted subjects, let’s all extend a giant middle finger to binaries and those forcing us to assimilate ourselves on their terms.

Michael Lucid, Dirty Girls, 2000, 17:57 min.

If the great and ominous cosmos doesn’t illicit terror in you, I have one word that will – teenagers.

The ghosts of horny, bursting, writhing, sprouting, half-baked humans haunt our existence from birth. Our future lies in front, but it is decidedly full of precocious, pimpled pricks trying to break people down.

Not only should the horror of becoming one strike fear in us all, but nothing is more of an affront to emerging identities than being trapped in the anarchy of adolescence, a place where people are scrutinizing our fragile selves and describing us with phrases like – “the girl who didn’t take a shower since Kurt Cobain died.”

From the mouths of babes…