彼得·尼克斯（Peter Nicks
Peter Nicks on ‘Homeroom’ and the Oakland Students Who Got Police Out of Their Schools
导演彼得·尼克斯（Peter Nicks）只是希望人们听孩子的话。“居室”，尼克斯的Hulu纪录片有关奥克兰高中2020年的高级班级以及解散学校警察局的斗争，就开始这样做。这是三部曲中有关该市社会机构的第三部，仅次于2012年关于高地医院的“候诊室”和2017年的“武力”，即奥克兰警察局。当尼克斯开始拍摄蔬菜作品时，他不知道什么17岁和18岁的孩子必须告诉他。他只是知道自己想制作一部会揭示“学生的情感生活”的电影。但是在与学校的两个“学生导演”见面后，他代表了同学在学校董事会前的利益，他开始以他没有想到的方式理解学生的身体。从那里，电影的角色开始出现，即学生导演丹尼尔森·加里波（Denilson Garibo）。当时，加里波（Garibo）正在与他的同行使地区学校董事会看到奥克兰学校警察局造成了多大的伤害。经过多次损失，包括全国大流行和警察暴行的重大案件的开始，加里波和他的学生占了上风：奥克兰统一学区通过了乔治·弗洛伊德的决议，以消除学校警察局。卡琳娜（Karina）在生产早期死于16岁的药物过量。尽管这部电影没有在奉献之外明确地提及她，但在电影的中心主题中感受到了她的影响力：年轻人需要多少资源并被倾听。接近与“早餐俱乐部”导演约翰·休斯（John Hughes）重叠。是什么促使您专门专门研究警察在学校中的存在？好吧，事实这是我们发现他们为之奋斗的一件事是使警察离开学校。我们不知道。因此，我们没有选择学校。我们之所以选择Denilson作为角色，是因为他是学校董事会的学生代表。我觉得他会带我们去一些有趣的地方。我们最初想做的是探索年轻人的不同原型。因此，不仅是学生领导者 - 辍学者，失败者，乔克斯，不满的人，正在处理情感问题的孩子，书呆子。我们想探索这种频谱 - 类似于他们在“早餐俱乐部”中所做的事情。乔治·弗洛伊德（George Floyd）发生了。所有这些事情都碰撞了，我们意识到那将是主要的线程电影。我更多地了解丹尼尔森。您是如何作为电影的中心“角色”降落在他身上的？我注意到[Denilson]当我们不与他交谈时。因为最初，这不是相机，只是对话，与孩子们见面并向他们介绍他们。我们会看到他与他的朋友的关系，我在那里看到了一些东西。他不是超级撤回的。他非常外向 - 很多孩子在社交上被撤回。最终，您不知道打开相机时会发生什么，是否有人撤退，但我们在那里看到了一些东西。我们尚未完全理解[]。他的力量，后来才揭示。实际上，关键时刻之一是我们第一次与他们拍摄，这是在他们举行的疯狂董事会会议之后。我们在学校董事会会议上的房间里拍摄，但是我们想以亲密的方式捕捉他们对他们自己在外面的反应。我们不得不接近他们并要求许可，他们一开始没有说“是”。他们非常谨慎。在那一刻，我们认识到这些孩子是di费用。他们非常战略。他们很体贴。他们正在思考事情。而且我们必须得到他们的尊重。当他们决定允许我们的决定时，当时他们相互尊重，我们认识到我们不能做我们想做的任何事情。这些是我们要做出自己选择的孩子。因为这是一部蔬菜电影，您永远无法向观众讲话，并解释可能是新手的复杂想法，例如为什么有人想解散警察部。您迫不及待地想听众赶上这个概念。那么，您是如何在没有过度解释这些孩子的思想的情况下对叙事进行构建的？这始终是一个挑战。我认为人们直到参加社论会议才完全了解Vérité电影制作多么困难。之所以如此复杂，是因为您无法阐明有时听众想要的特异性。您不能像有时想要t那样手持观众哦，就充分理解正在发生的事情而手持式。但是，您只需要充满信心地认为，歧义最终令人沮丧，最终是最具启发性的事情。因为生活中有歧义。在生活中，有复杂性。您并不总是回答所有问题。您想了解的是某种亲密感或真实性的感觉，使观众能够以不同的方式看待自己和周围的世界，并帮助我们建立同理心，并能够以不同的方式看到彼此。在前几代人中，他们被误解了。并且他们拥有没有在SAT分数或GPA上捕获的技能，或者由大学确定的技能。他们正在获得所有这些技能，信息和知识。在没有任何成年人的空间中。在社交媒体上。显然，这也有很多缺点。这就是我们与我们的女儿打交道的经过八年的抑郁症和滥用毒品的斗争，埃德在拍摄开始时就离开了。她学会了如何在线切割。她找到了一个沮丧的其他孩子的社区，谈论自杀，以这种方式相互证实，这是非常危险的。那里没有成年人说：“嘿，等一下。”这两件事正在同时发生。因此，我们有一代年轻人以这种误解的方式来临。而且我认为，这个队列，这群孩子 - 我们的[我们自己的]孩子，那个孩子Greta Thunberg，Parkland Kids-他们了解成年人对自己的代理商不喜欢的东西。他们自己的声音的力量。因此，年轻人与教育概念之间的关系从根本上发生了变化。这是我们想要允许这部电影传达的另一件事。这是[运动]发生的事实。布雷娜·泰勒（Breonna Taylor）被杀并不奇怪，乔治·弗洛伊德（George Floyd）被杀，艾哈迈德阿伯里被杀。这并不奇怪。令人印象深刻的是与Covid的碰撞。这些已经从中夺走了很多。这些孩子已经把事情从中夺走了，并且一直在处理世代相传的创伤。枪支暴力，贫困，学校到监狱管道，住房不安全感，粮食不安全，种族主义。然后，您有了Covid，剥夺了他们走过该阶段并庆祝该门槛的能力。带走他们参加舞会的能力。夺走他们表演学校比赛的能力。然而，他们能够找到自己的声音。这让我惊讶。这是我们真正想与观众分享的东西。而且，为了提醒他们，这些孩子并不全都毕业。这些孩子在坐着660年代。这些孩子没有检查我们要求他们检查的所有盒子以证明他们的生活潜力。但是，他们在这里。
Director Peter Nicks just wants people to listen to kids.
“Homeroom,” Nicks’ Hulu documentary about Oakland High School’s senior class of 2020 and their fight to disband the school police department, sets out to do just that. It’s the third in a trilogy about the city’s social institutions, after 2012’s “The Waiting Room” about Highland Hospital, and 2017’s “The Force,” about the Oakland Police Department.
When Nicks started shooting the vérité piece, he didn’t know what kinds of stories the 17 and 18-year-olds would have to tell him. He just knew he wanted to make a film that would reveal “the emotional lives of students.” But after meeting the school’s two “student directors,” who represented their classmates’ interests in front of the school board, he began to understand the student body in a way he hadn’t expected.
From there, the film’s characters began to emerge, namely student director Denilson Garibo. A senior at the time, Garibo was fighting alongside his peers to make the district school board see how much harm the Oakland School Police Department was causing the students. After many losses, including the start of the pandemic and major cases of police brutality nationwide, Garibo and his students prevailed: the Oakland Unified School District passed the George Floyd Resolution to eliminate the school police department.
“Homeroom” is dedicated to Nicks’ daughter Karina, who died of a drug overdose at age 16 early in the production. Though the film doesn’t make mention of her explicitly outside of the dedication, her influence is felt in the film’s central themes: how much young people need resources and to be listened to.
Nicks told Variety what makes Gen Z different and how his filmmaking approach overlaps with "The Breakfast Club" director John Hughes.
You had planned for a while that the third film in your Oakland trilogy would be about education. What led you to focus on police presence in schools specifically?
Well, the fact that we discovered that one of the things that they were fighting for was to get the police out of the schools. We didn't know that. We didn't choose the school because of that. We chose Denilson as a character because he's a student representative on the school board. I felt that he would take us someplace interesting. What we wanted to do initially was explore the different archetypes of young people. So not just student leaders — the dropouts, the losers, the jocks, the disaffected, the kids who are dealing with emotional problems, the nerds. We wanted to explore that spectrum — similar to what they did in “The Breakfast Club.”
Then we realized that Denilson and his group of student leaders have been working since day one to get the police out the schools. And George Floyd happens. All these things collided and we realized that that was going to be the dominant thread movie.
Tell me more about Denilson. How did you land on him as the central “character” of the film?
I noticed [Denilson] when we weren't in conversations with him. Because initially, it was no cameras, just conversations, meeting kids and introducing ourselves to them. We would see how he was relating to his friends, and I saw something there. He wasn't super withdrawn. He was very outgoing — a lot of kids are withdrawn socially. Ultimately, you don't know what's gonna happen when you turn the camera on, whether somebody retreats, but we saw something there.
We didn't fully understand [yet.] His power, that was only revealed later. In fact, one of the critical moments was the first time we filmed with them, which was after this crazy board meeting that they had. We filmed in the room at the school board meeting, but we wanted to capture their reaction to it in an intimate way afterwards while they were outside by themselves. We had to approach them and ask for permission, and they didn't say yes at first. They were very cautious. And we recognized in that moment that these kids were different. They were very strategic. They were very thoughtful. They were thinking things through. And that we had to get their respect. Something that clicked at that moment, a mutual respect, when they made the decision to allow us and we recognized that we couldn't just do whatever we want. These were kids that we're going to make their own choices.
Because this is a vérité film, you’re never able to address the audience and explain complex ideas that might be new to them, like why someone would want to disband a police department. You can’t wait for the audience to catch up on that concept. So how did you approach building the narrative without over-explaining what was on these kids’ minds?
It's always a challenge. I don't think people fully understand how difficult vérité filmmaking is until they're in an editorial meeting. It's so complicated because you cannot articulate the specificity that sometimes audiences want. You can't hand-hold audiences the way that sometimes they want to be hand-held, in terms of understanding fully what's going on. But you just have to proceed with confidence that the ambiguity, as frustrating as it may be, is ultimately the most illuminating thing. Because in life, there's ambiguity. In life, there's complexity. You don't always have all the questions answered. What you're trying to get at is some feeling of intimacy or authenticity that allows the audience to see themselves and the world around them differently, and help us build empathy and be able to see each other differently.
Young people feel, today more than in previous generations, that they're misunderstood. And that they are in possession of skills that aren’t captured on an SAT score or a GPA or determined by the college that they go to. And they're gaining all these skills and information and knowledge from each other. In spaces absent of any adults. On social media.
Obviously, there's a lot of downside to that, too. This is what we dealt with with our daughter who passed away at the beginning of filming, after an eight years long battle with depression and substance abuse. She learned how to cut online. She found a community of other kids who were depressed, talking about suicide, validating each other in this other way that's very dangerous. And there are no adults in there to say, “Hey, wait a minute.”
Those two things are happening simultaneously. So we have a generation of young people who are coming of age in this misunderstood way. And I think this cohort, this group of kids — our [own] kids, that kid Greta Thunberg, the Parkland kids — who understand something that adults do not about their own agency. The power of their own voice. So that relationship between young people and the notion of education has fundamentally shifted. And that's another thing that we were wanting to allow the film to communicate.
And the fact that this [movement] happened. It wasn't surprising that Breonna Taylor was killed, that George Floyd was killed, that Ahmaud Arbery was killed. That wasn't surprising. What was remarkable was the collision of that with COVID. These had so much taken away from them. And these are kids who have had things taken away from them and have been dealing with generational trauma forever. Gun violence, poverty, school-to-prison pipeline, housing insecurity, food insecurity, racism. And then here you have COVID, taking away their ability to walk across that stage and celebrate that threshold. Taking away their ability to go to prom. Taking away their ability to perform the school play. And nevertheless, they were able to find their voice. And that was astounding to me. That was something that we really wanted to share with the audience. And also to remind them, these are kids who aren’t all going to graduate. These are kids who are getting 660s on their SATs. These are kids who don't check all the boxes that we're asking them to check to prove their potential in life. Yet, here they are.
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发表于 2022-7-5 05:27:41
发表于 2022-11-15 00:28:23