Worth: $14.00
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Cast:
Hamilton Harris, Harold Hunter, Justin Pierce
Intro:
Hamilton Harris is a natural born storyteller with a talent for spinning yarns, which lifts what might have been a by-the-numbers tell-all to an engagingly honest commentary on the pitfalls of taking metaphorical candy from strangers.
Cult film director Larry Clark’s work (Kids, Ken Park) is dysfunctional, disturbing, and brutal to watch. Confronting audiences with frank depictions of teenage social dynamics, Clark gained a reputation for showing the gritty underbelly of the sex lives and delinquency of ‘90s youth. With We Were Once Kids, Australian documentary filmmaker Eddie Martin (All This Mayhem, Have You Seen the Listers?) has joined forces with Kids star Hamilton Harris to uncover the exploitation and mistreatment of the young cast of one of Clark’s most iconic films.
26 years on from the release of Kids, the 1995 indie hit chronicling a weekend of parties, drugs, and questionable sex amongst a group of Harlem teens, the cast and crew of the film have long gone their separate ways. Some moved to LA to pursue the taste of fame Clark gave them, others have chosen to settle down and raise families of their own, while a notable few never got the chance to do either.
Harris and his one-time co-stars Justin Pierce, and Harold Hunter were a tight-knit group of skateboarders facing a world of poverty and very little opportunity, a dysfunctional family who the media labelled as degenerates and deviants after Clark’s embellished portrait was released. In a series of heartfelt conversations with Harris and his castmates, director Eddie Martin seeks to uncover the long-term effects of the financial and emotional manipulation that besieged Clark’s set.
Hamilton Harris is a natural born storyteller with a talent for spinning yarns, which lifts what might have been a by-the-numbers tell-all to an engagingly honest commentary on the pitfalls of taking metaphorical candy from strangers. Cut together with an impressive collection of archive footage, Martin presents the opportunity for the so-called dirtbags and degenerates to take back possession of the narrative and share their side of a story two decades in the making.
