WADE IN THE WATER, CHILDREN
Price: $310.00 Code: 2353 |
Directed by Elizabeth Wood and Gabriel Nussbaum
Created and Filmed by the 6th and 8th Grade Documentary Film Class, Singleton Charter Middle School at the Dryades YMCA, Central City, New Orleans, LA
2008, 75 minutes
Purchase: $310 | Classroom Rental: $125
The directors of Wade in the Water, Children are available for speaking engagements.
For more information, please contact us at (800) 723-5522.
Through a passionate mixture of private videos, uncensored interviews and school-day adventures, the children of New Orleans' violent Central City neighborhood have created a riveting portrait of urban youth at the heart of an ongoing American crisis.
No one set out to make a film: two young artists arrived in New Orleans with a free arts program, intended to help students creatively express their thoughts in response to the chaos after Katrina. Their documentary-film class at Singleton Charter School at the local YMCA invited students to take video-cameras home and tell their stories on their own terms. The results quickly transcended the classroom.
Through their own remarkably honest and unusual footage, we enter the kids' shuttered housing projects, flooded homes and darkened streets. We discover a New Orleans that was a disaster long before Katrina, a place where role models are scarce and gun violence is normal. The children show you a New Orleans that adults are afraid to discuss, and that a film crew could never penetrate.
Wade in the Water, Children offers a revealing look at life in New Orleans through the eyes of its youngest citizens.
* Official Selection, Newport International Film Festival, 2008
* Official Selection, Hamptons International Film Festival, 2008
“Highly Recommended. A searing and heartbreaking portrait of the failures of New Orleans to help its most disadvantaged citizens both pre and post Katrina. An eye opening and disturbing examination of what happened from “the children’s point of view,” a story that is funny, bitter, profane and extraordinarily perceptive.” - Educational Media Reviews Online
"A must-see." – The Boston Globe
“Considering the nature of the project, it’s not surprising that the video diaries feature amateur touches – ranging from shaky camerawork to the intrusion of clownish classmates hamming it up for the cameras – but the raw images and observations captured here are often profound, speaking to a remarkable resilience on the part of the children, even in the face of extraordinary squalor and decay. Recommended.” - Video Librarian
"A devastating, first-hand account of life in post-Katrina New Orleans, told from the mouths of babes who are surviving it under outrageous living conditions. Scalding stuff." – New York Newsday
"This film is especially important and powerful in how it intimately reveals the desperate situation before the storm, as well as afterward." – Paul Goldberger, Journalist, The New Yorker & The New York Times
"A remarkable look at the students' lives that delves far below the surface of Katrina wreckage. Wade in the Water, Children is one of the treasures salvaged from the wake of the levee failures." – The New Orleans Gambit Weekly
Created and Filmed by the 6th and 8th Grade Documentary Film Class, Singleton Charter Middle School at the Dryades YMCA, Central City, New Orleans, LA
2008, 75 minutes
Purchase: $310 | Classroom Rental: $125
The directors of Wade in the Water, Children are available for speaking engagements.
For more information, please contact us at (800) 723-5522.
Through a passionate mixture of private videos, uncensored interviews and school-day adventures, the children of New Orleans' violent Central City neighborhood have created a riveting portrait of urban youth at the heart of an ongoing American crisis.
No one set out to make a film: two young artists arrived in New Orleans with a free arts program, intended to help students creatively express their thoughts in response to the chaos after Katrina. Their documentary-film class at Singleton Charter School at the local YMCA invited students to take video-cameras home and tell their stories on their own terms. The results quickly transcended the classroom.
Through their own remarkably honest and unusual footage, we enter the kids' shuttered housing projects, flooded homes and darkened streets. We discover a New Orleans that was a disaster long before Katrina, a place where role models are scarce and gun violence is normal. The children show you a New Orleans that adults are afraid to discuss, and that a film crew could never penetrate.
Wade in the Water, Children offers a revealing look at life in New Orleans through the eyes of its youngest citizens.
Subjects & Collections
2009 Urban Studies Sociology Psychology & Psychiatry Media Studies Health Education Cinema Studies Anthropology American Studies African-American Studies Directed by Women
Festivals & Awards
* Audience Award Winner, New Orleans Human Rights Film Festival, 2008* Official Selection, Newport International Film Festival, 2008
* Official Selection, Hamptons International Film Festival, 2008
Reviews
"This is a great film." – Al Gore“Highly Recommended. A searing and heartbreaking portrait of the failures of New Orleans to help its most disadvantaged citizens both pre and post Katrina. An eye opening and disturbing examination of what happened from “the children’s point of view,” a story that is funny, bitter, profane and extraordinarily perceptive.” - Educational Media Reviews Online
"A must-see." – The Boston Globe
“Considering the nature of the project, it’s not surprising that the video diaries feature amateur touches – ranging from shaky camerawork to the intrusion of clownish classmates hamming it up for the cameras – but the raw images and observations captured here are often profound, speaking to a remarkable resilience on the part of the children, even in the face of extraordinary squalor and decay. Recommended.” - Video Librarian
"A devastating, first-hand account of life in post-Katrina New Orleans, told from the mouths of babes who are surviving it under outrageous living conditions. Scalding stuff." – New York Newsday
"This film is especially important and powerful in how it intimately reveals the desperate situation before the storm, as well as afterward." – Paul Goldberger, Journalist, The New Yorker & The New York Times
"A remarkable look at the students' lives that delves far below the surface of Katrina wreckage. Wade in the Water, Children is one of the treasures salvaged from the wake of the levee failures." – The New Orleans Gambit Weekly