#edgeofeighteen

http://aztecpressonline.com/2014/09/edge-of-eighteen-shows-education-from-teens-perspective/

BY KATIE STEWART

Academy Award filmmaker Alex Gibney and Al Jazeera America’s award-winning documentary strand will be premiering their latest TV documentary, “Edge of Eighteen” on Sept 7 at 9 p.m. ET and 6 p.m. PT, with six hour-long original episodes airing Sunday evenings through October.

The “Edge of Eighteen” documentary is about teens and education in the United States, a provoking, informative documentary series that takes a look at a portrait of life as a teenager in United States which is filmed by the students themselves.

Gibney along with producers Dave Snyder and Amy Kohn sent out a call for 17 and 18-year-old students willing to document their lives from the start of 2014 until their high school graduations.

The series is told through a first person’s arc of the students’ lives and raises many important questions about the United States educational system.

The six part documentary series inquire into the educational issues kids face and how their personal lives tie into their ability to make decisions about their future.

“This series is more than anything a portrait of a generation,” Kohn said. “We were interested in looking at how teens on the edge of adulthood were facing the issues of the day in our highly connected, ever changing and fast paced world.”

What they found was the new generation interests was of a variety of issues such as education, financial aid, gay rights, separation of church and state, violence in their communities, teen pregnancy, bullying and much more.

Al Jazeera America inspired approached with Jigsaw about doing a series on education.

“Our goal was to show the educational environment of teens through their own eyes and experiences so the world could see how the people living within the system viewed and experienced it,” Kohn said.

“As we worked with the teens, we found that issues of education couldn’t be separated from all of the other challenges, triumphs, and issues that they faced on a daily basis,” she added.

The “Edge of Eighteen” series follows the tradition of verite documentary, exploring real lives as they unfold and through this process they discovered an abundance of issues and ideas.

They contacted thousands of students, received hundreds of applications and narrowed it down to the 15 students represented in this project.

“We did extensive outreach to schools and organizations working with teens to try to find a group of students that represented the economic, religious, racial, ideological, and political diversity of this country,” Kohn said.

The students featured were founded to be bright, engaged and concerned about their communities and their futures but the resources they needed to get the education they want and fulfill their dreams aren’t always there.

“Certainly this series shows that teens today are dealing with a lot of very challenging issues. Education is expensive. Financial aid isn’t easy to get or available to everyone,” Kohn said.

Kohn added that this generation has very different views from their parents about issues such as gay rights and faces new issues related to things such as cyberbullying which previous generations never faced.

“As hard as teens fight for what they want to build their future, they face a lot of challenges and we definitely saw that the resources you are given at home, from your school, and your community make a huge difference,” Kohn said

Kohn added that their purpose was to paint a picture of this generation by letting the students tell their own stories.

“We felt that by giving them the camera and letting them define the agenda, that we would get something powerful, raw, and real,” said Kohn. “So much of what is on TV today is reality TV – but this is a documentary and we really let the students speak for themselves.”

They hope their powerful words, ideas and images will get people talking and thinking about what it means to be a teen and an adult today.

Kohn added we also examined what challenges these teens face today and how they uniquely and creatively work through them to get the most out of their experiences.

The students came to New York for a quick course in documentary filmmaking from Gibney, director Alexandra and editor Sam Pollard.

Each student received Canon XA10 cameras, tripods, microphones and other essential gear along with the knowledge of storytelling, interviewing skills, cinematography, sound recording, and editing.

The students then returned home to tell their own stories, the honest portrayals of their lives, by documenting events and doing weekly video diaries and interviews with parents, teachers, and other people in their lives.

Professional producers shuttled among the students, often filming alongside them and working with them to sharpen their stories.