By Carla M. Collad
STAFF WRITER
10-04-2007
Starting today (Thursday), a group of local Cambodian teens will embark on a yearlong journey to explore their parents’ experiences as refugees of war and their own places in society.
They will document it all in the film “My Reality and My Vision: Stories from Long Beach.”
Long Beach’s Khmer Girls in Action (KGA) will join seven other organizations statewide today at San Francisco State University to kick off the “How I See It: Youth Digital Filmmakers” project. The project is sponsored by the California Council for the Humanities, which gave KGA a $30,000 grant to put together its film.
Teenagers participating in the project — ranging in age from 14 to 18 — will work with experienced filmmakers, community mentors and humanities scholars to focus on the theme of “connections” and “disconnections” in their lives and communities. Topics among the groups will include inner-city violence, homelessness, immigration, the endangered culture of Native people, struggles of farm workers and being LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender).
The girls of KGA will use their film to examine their families’ refugee experiences and how they see their own place in Long Beach, now and in the future. The film also will highlight efforts to designate the city’s Anaheim Corridor as an official “Cambodian Town.”
During the launch event today and tomorrow, the young filmmakers will meet for the first time and attend workshops on storytelling and digital filmmaking techniques. Throughout the next year, the groups will stay connected via a program-wide online blog.
“Throughout the California Stories: How I See It campaign, we want to give young people the chance to share — in their own words — what their lives are like, what they care about, and what it’s like to grow up in today’s California,” Council Executive Director Jim Quay said.
The How I See It project ends in summer 2008. The films will then will be screened locally in fall 2008 in the youths’ communities, broadcast on cable TV and will be available for viewing on the council’s Web site (www.calhum.org).
“It’s important for them to have a voice in their communities and for our state’s leaders to hear and consider young peoples’ voices when making the decisions that affect their future,” Quay said.
The Youth Digital Filmmakers program is being done in partnership with the Digital Storytelling Institute of the Community Technology Foundation of California.
The seven other participating groups come from San Francisco, Oakland, Concord, Los Angeles, Fresno, Lodi and Siskiyou County.
To learn more about the How I See It: Youth Digital Filmmakers project, visit www.californiastories.org.
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