Super excited that Ashley/Amber is part of the first-ever Brooklyn Girl Film Festival! Hope some of you can make it! Also, check out the reviews in The Independent Critic and We Are Movie Geeks.
Ashley/Amber at the BROOKLYN GIRL FILM FESTIVAL
Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 6:30pm
Launchpad, 721 Franklin Ave, Brooklyn, NY, USA
screening in Short Films, Block 2
tix: $10 or $20 for day pass – purchase online
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Ashley/Amber will screen in Istanbul on March 19 & 28 at the AKBANK 8. KISA FILM FESTIVAL!
Ashley/Amber at the AKBANK 8. KISA FILM FESTIVAL
Akbank Sanat, Istiklal Cad. No:8 34435 Beyoglu-?stanbul
screening in International Section (A)
Monday 03/19/2012 at 18:30
&
Wednesday 03/28/2010 at 13:00
Context: The Maplewood-South Orange School District, which I attended my entire public school career, is in the process of de-leveling the middle school. The district belongs to a community with many wonderful and unique characteristics: suburban, easy public access to NYC, artistically vibrant, and both racially and economically diverse. But the leveling system reveals an uglier side, as the school is blatantly segregated along racial (and socio-economic) lines.
You can read the district’s proposal here. A paper profiling three case studies of successful elimination of “curricular stratification” can be found here. Its focus is on how to de-level, but the endnotes contain an overview of the literature on why, with two decades of papers discussing the benefits of heterogeneous grouping. Our district is in communication with one of the district’s profiled, and seems to be following the steps outlined in the paper.
Finally, I was inspired to prepare these remarks after attending a discussion of alumni last week. It was a powerful post-mortem on our public school experiences. Hearing first-hand the vastly different experience some of my peers had in the very same schools has motivated me to get involved in this issue (again). The discussion was hosted by a filmmaker and fellow district alumnus Cris Thorne, who is working on a documentary called Deleveling the System. Excerpts of the discussion are online here and here. Additionally, I highly recommend Cris’s earlier documentary (produced as a high school student!), One School, for more background.
Finally, I should note that I was unable to read the complete transcript, because I had prepared for the standard 3 minutes of public comment and found out upon arrival that we were restricted to two minutes.
My name is Rebecca Rojer, CHS class of 2005.
As a k-12 alumnus of this district, it is clear to me that the leveling system is not colorblind. In both the classrooms and the hallways, white students are consistently given the benefit of the doubt, while black students are assumed to be trouble-makers and low achievers. Students enter school with different degrees of preparedness, but the leveling system calcifies these differences into inequalities.
Worse, the leveling system turns prejudice into self-fulfilling prophecy. Low expectations correlate to low performance. For example, women perform worse on math exams after being told there is a genetic difference in math ability between the sexes.
There is clearly a place for grouping students by skill-level and motivation. But it is not always beneficial, even for “top” students. This is especially true of the turbulent and vicious middle-school years, where academic success is better predicted by behavior and obedience than by aptitude.
There are many styles of learning – fast, slow, deep, shallow, literal, abstract, disciplined, intuitive – yet we conceive of “high” and “low” achievers through standardized tests that are valued precisely because they simplify everyone onto a single metric. When testing becomes the end game of education, we all suffer. Excessive reliance on testing dehumanizes students and ultimately sabotages their education. Students who feel valued and respected are more apt to learn. The infuriating paradox in our district is that top-level classes are discussion based, encouraging of critical thinking and debate, while lower-level classes too often focus exclusively on test prep.
Education is about empathy, respect, creativity, and citizenship as much as it is about literacy and arithmetic. These values reenforce each other. Knowledge is power, and schools should empower students. Let’s teach compound interest alongside the history of redlining and predatory lending. Education is about life, not the GEPA.
There is much to be gained by heterogenous classes. One of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to a peer. And one of the best ways to be challenged, is to be confronted by someone who’s experiences and values are different from your own. That is what I most cherish from my education in this district. And for that, I really have to thank a group of my classmates, some of whom who are here tonight, for literally stopping classes my senior year to create a conversation among students in different levels.
Lets not forget, we’re all in this together. Today’s students are tomorrow’s voters, workers, mortgage-signers, taxpayers, parents, neighbors. Your children’s lives are affected not just by their own education, but by the education of everyone who participates in this society. To fret about the rigor of your special snowflake’s 6th grade social studies curriculum in light of massive, structural inequality is short-sighted and just plain wrong.
There is a wide-spread assumption that integrating classes will destroy our education system and wipe out our property values. Students can feel this very early on, and it is exactly this kind of attitude that perpetuates inequality. The best way to lift your property values is to do what’s right: work towards a system that benefits all students instead of only half. Lets reject the politics of fear, and instead move forward with empathy, creativity, and determination.
I am so pleased to write that as of the past month, my short film has become outdated. Ashely/Amber is now a relic of another era.
The American protest movement has found it’s fighting spirit. Throughout the nation, the people are out in the streets. Normal people, by which I mean people who’ve never lived in a nudist cooperative house in the Bay Area, are debating the merits of consensus-based decision making and self-governance. We are openly asking: should we play by the rules, control our image, present a simple & easy message? Or is protest not just a means to an ends, but an assertion of democratic sovereignty, which therefore must accommodate the messiness of many opinions, values, and approaches?
The Occupy Movement has thus far negotiated this dilemma beautifully, adopting as its slogan a simple and appealing statement that asserts the rule of the people. The means is the end. We are the 99% and we want a government that represents us. So we assemble in the streets, and represent ourselves. But beyond the initial catharsis of overthrowing our apathy and helplessness, can we keep this going? I hope so, and I hope my film can contribute in some small way, if only to remind us of how impossible this moment felt half a year ago.
[cross-posted at www.ashley-amber.com]
Lots of screenings coming up!
Fri 10.14.2011 / 7p / Rutgers University
Voorhees Hall #105, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ
Best of 2011 New Jersey International Film Festival
Best of 2011 New Jersey International Film Festival #1
13, 14 & 15 October / 18 Uhr / In der Brotfabrik
Back To Politics Teil 1
Sat. 22 October / 7p / National Film Board Cinema, Toronto
150 John Street, Toronto, CA
Wildsound Toronto Film Festival
For free tickets, email info@wildsound.ca
ASHLEY/AMBER at the Williamsburg Int’l Film Fest
A short film about an antiwar activist who finds fame after being outed as the one-time star of an internet porn video.
** afternoon screening **
Friday, September 23 · 2:00pm – 4:00pm
The Knitting Factory
361 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
Screening in the Student Film Program I @ Willifest
$10 – purchase tix
www.ashley-amber.com / www.willifest.com
[cross-posted at ashley-amber.com]
Ashley/Amber is out on DVD today as part of BACK TO POLITICS, a compilation of 10 short films curated by Berlinale shorts director Maike Mia Höhne.
»Im Alter von 22 Jahren bläst Christoph Schlingensief auf offener Straße und im Schnee seinen Landsleuten die Nationalhymne. Ein klares Eingangsstatement, anhand dessen sich kaum die Frage stellt, ob man sich aufgrund der Hymne von seinem Stuhl erhebt. Prolog & programmatisch für die Auswahl BACK TO POLITICS.
Entlang der Filme lässt sich darüber spekulieren, wie die politische Lage derzeit einzuschätzen ist, wie sie sich zum Besseren verändern lässt. Politisches Handeln weist viele Facetten auf und ist nicht ausschließlich an Tagespolitik geknüpft, sondern tritt in banal anmutenden Entscheidungen zu Tage, die jede und jeder praktisch ständig zu treffen hat. Wie und was ist der Mensch, der entscheidet? In Annäherungen werden prekäre Arbeitsverhältnisse, Ich-AGs und illegale Erwerbsarbeit verhandelt. Die Frage vom Ich im Ganzen bleibt. Zum Ende geht die historische These, wie Sex und Politik zusammengehen, neue Wege. Der Erwartung wird das Leben zugesetzt.«
[Dietmar Schwärzler & Maike Mia Höhne]
It’s quite an honor to be included in this collection. There are some really excellent films including Hugo Lilja’s Aterfödelsen, the dystopian zombie film that screened with us in Berlin.
Order at good!movies & amazon.de
My short film Ashley/Amber just won the award for “Best Student Film” at the 2011 NJ International Film Festival.
