By Josef Arbiv
The 2002 documentary, Lost In La Mancha, saw directors, Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton, take the tattered remnants of the would be making-of for Terry Gilliam’s adaption of the Spanish literary hero Don Quixote, and craft it into something meaningful, and worthy of praise and commendation. Now, after a brief foray into feature filmmaking with 2005’s little seen Brothers Of The Head, the pair return to the documentary form with The Bad Kids, in which they examine a Mojave Desert school that is attempting to do something similar by taking the beaten, bruised and disregarded, the victims of a generational cycle of poverty, and mould them into the kind of kids that they have the potential to be.
What was the impetus for making The Bad Kids? Why this particular subject?
“It began when we were commissioned to make a series of online short documentaries that were aimed at an audience of teachers, to share best practices in public education. As filmmakers, we are always looking for conflict. We were seeking out schools that weren’t the most well-funded schools, where teachers were making progress with limited means because that can obviously inspire a teacher anywhere. When we were doing this work, it was in the wake of a big American documentary called Waiting For Superman, which created a very negative sentiment about public school teachers. It felt meaningful to us to be spending time with these overworked and under paid public school teachers who weren’t giving up and who were working within a difficult system with a lot of challenges and still having success. When we came across Black Rock High School, we instantly fell in love with it. We were told that this is the school where the pregnant kids go, and the kids who are recovering from addiction, and the homeless kids. But when we walked into Black Rock, there was this immediate surprise at how warm and open and friendly and vulnerable these kids were. We knew that this school merited more than a 10-minute online documentary. So we didn’t pitch it to anybody, and we didn’t ask for financing from anybody. We just took our equipment, and started shooting.”
You adopted an observational, vérité approach which is quite different to some of your previous work…
“Keith and I met when we were in our mid-20s in film school, and ever since then, we have said, ‘One day, we’re gonna make a documentary that’s purely observational, and that doesn’t need interviews or narration to tell you the story. And it’s going to be like all these favourite documentaries of ours.’ We are huge fans of French cinema vérité traditions, and the American direct cinema of The Maysles Brothers, D. A. Pennebaker, and Fred Wiseman. With every documentary, we’ve always said that that’s what we’re going to do, and then we lose our nerve and resort to interviews because we’re not able to communicate what we want to. On Lost In La Mancha, we said, ‘We’re not going to use narration and interviews,’ and it just wasn’t possible for what we were trying to communicate. On this, we didn’t want to give ourselves the option to tell the story that way, and part of that was just wanting to subvert the expectations of an education documentary which is traditionally, in the United States, laden with the commentary of experts. We also wanted to privilege the emotional experience of the students at Black Rock. Part of the aim of the film is to subvert the audience’s perception of these ‘bad kids’, and the way to do that is to put the audience into their experience – to make the audience experience life from the perspectives of these young people. The way that you do that is by being with them, and by spending observational time with them.”
The stand out character in the film is the school principal, Vonda Viland. She and the rest of the staff are really surrogate parents to these kids, but as the staff meetings reveal, their work at the school takes a huge emotional toll on them. They are the kids’ last chance. Do you see it as a precarious system, dependent on the goodwill of individuals?
“Principal Viland and the teachers at Black Rock are stepping into a socio-economic situation that is not sustainable. These kids are part of these generational cycles of abuse, addiction, teen pregnancy, and poverty. The conventional wisdom in our country about the type of kids that you see in the film is that they need a stricter upbringing, they need more discipline, and less tolerance. Vonda and her co-workers see their students not as the toughest kids, but as the most vulnerable kids in the population. Vonda said, ‘At a traditional school, this is a kid that needs more punishment, and at our school, this is a kid that needs more love.’ To many people, these kids are beyond help; the system in the United States would look at most of these kids and say, ‘It’s not worth us spending the time on them.’ One of the most inspiring things about Vonda and all the teachers at Black Rock and the district that supports them is that they feel that we don’t have to give up on these kids. There is something to be gained as a society at large by not throwing them away.”
Do you think that the generational cycle of poverty can be broken by education alone? Isn’t there a need for more structural change?
“In the context of our film, there are three kids that we focus on, and one kid breaks out. She says, ‘I’m not going to repeat the patterns of my family.’ She has succeeded, and she is on her way to making those steps. Then there’s a kid who hasn’t broken out of it yet but who makes a small step in the right direction, and then there’s a kid who can’t quite pull it off, who unfortunately succumbs to the cycle. Principal Viland views what she does not as a fixing job, but as planting the seed. It might not germinate while the kid is at school, but planting a seed has the possibility to help the kid down the line. There is a genuine human value to the structure of societies when one human being turns to another and says, ‘I care about you and I want you to have a better life. I empathise with the difficulty of your situation, but I would like to see you in a better place.’ That is where Black Rock succeeds, because traditional American high school doesn’t want to know about your problems at home. ‘Leave your problems at home. Come here and do your math.’ The approach of Black Rock says, ‘How can you expect a kid to do math when they are worried about where their next meal is coming from, or where they are going to sleep tonight, or if they’re going to be abused or beaten by the person at home?’ The acknowledgement is the first step in breaking the cycle.”
What do you hope that your documentary achieves?
“We’re very early in the process. The film is only at a few film festivals so far, and we’ve been designing a social impact campaign. It’s a much more organised effort to use a film to spark conversations and hopefully social change. One of the prime components is to get the film seen by policy makers in American public education, and to get the film seen by communities that deal with this type of at-risk student body and might not be so open to their needs. We want to spark conversations about the need for schools like Black Rock in communities that have a large population of students who are at risk of dropping out. There’s an unfortunate trend in America which is a focus on ‘my own child.’ You know, ‘I don’t want my kid at the school with those kids.’ And so our outreach campaign has among its strategies, screenings in Washington D.C for education policy makers, and trying to get the film screened in school districts where school boards make decisions about how much support to give to an alternative school like Black Rock. We also want to get the film screened to teachers to show them an approach to dealing with a population of at-risk students that they might not take. It’s very easy to look at these kids and label them ‘bad kids.’ Then there’s also the need to show the film to at-risk youth themselves.”
The Bad Kids is screening as part of The Human Rights Arts & Film Festival, which runs from May 5-June 8. For all venue, session, and ticketing information, head to The Human Rights Arts & Film Festival. For more on the film itself, head to The Bad Kids.
