Of dreams, discrimination and persecution

Winnipeg documentary brings out discomforting tales from inner-city classrooms

Students at Winnipeg’s Gordon Bell High School tell their stories in the important new documentary The Storytelling Project.

“I used to feel [that] perhaps I was the only one these terrible things happened to. You know [I] never ever agreed to tell this story to anyone, but then after I read Ishmael Beah’s book, it really encouraged me to tell my story,” explains a student of one of Winnipeg’s most notorious inner city schools: Gordon Bell High School.

Gordon Bell is both ethnically and economically diverse, receiving a large amount of press this past year over their controversial petition for green space. Yet the school is often stereotyped as dangerous.

Students and teachers describe more of a segregated atmosphere between students from south and central Winnipeg, northern Aboriginal communities or refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Burma.

John Paskievich and John Whiteway’s documentary begins with Ishmael Beah, author of A Long Way Gone, lecturing about his forced recruitment into the Sierra Leone army at age 12.

After the school board introduced Beah’s novel into the curriculum, it began to spark curiosity in some of Gordon Bell’s students, paving the way for teacher Marc Kuly’s after-school storytelling project.

Kuly and about 30 students are the focus of this documentary, which records their journey together. It begins with simple naming and acknowledgment exercises and escalates into revealing stories of student’s dreams and dealing with discrimination and persecution.

“It’s not like being white, you have everything and you have no pain in your life. It’s all the same,” said one refugee student, who told of once having to sift through the body parts of family members to identify them.

Looking closely at how Gorden Bell models many of our university campuses and communities, but also reflects the possibilities of empathy, Paskievich and Whiteway’s film shows the implications of new, relevant literature in today’s classrooms. The filmmakers encourage the role of storytelling in liberating the most horrifying pasts.

But in a move which feels contradictory to one of the film’s primary themes, Paskievich and Whiteway fail to present subtitles with student’s names, which is a particularly glaring error, as it is especially important during individual storytelling. Kuly’s first exercise stresses the importance of names and the film’s lack of subtitles may instead leave audiences to label students based on their appearance.

The film will feature an opening night introduction from by its directors, Kuly and students from the project when it premieres on Friday, Nov. 27.

Published in Volume 64, Number 13 of The Uniter (November 26, 2009)

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