It’s a wonderful winter here and a perfect start to this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The festival received over 1,400 submissions and only 112 of them are features that were selected to be shown. For this year, 10 teens from all three of Planned Parenthood’s Teen Council’s are participating in the festival. These teens will be watching films, conducting interviews, participating in panel discussions, and blogging about it all! This year the following films will be blogged about:
The Infiltrators
SHARE
Gaza
This Is Personal
Maiden
Toni Morrison: The Pieces I am
Ask Dr. Ruth
Pahokee
Words From A Bear
Midnight Traveler Knock Down the House
Birth of The Cool
Some teens bloggers will also the chance to participate in the Vr cinematic experience that is featured in this year’s festival. These 10 teens come from a wide array of high schools within the Valley and Park City. To learn more about this year’s phenomenal group of teens, via the “Meet the Team” page on the website. Another way to keep up with bloggers is to follow the tumblr page or look for links on any PPAU website!
Utah Teens Talk Film bloggers are members of Planned Parenthood Association of Utah’s Teen Council. They work as peer sex educators in their schools and communities. As members of the blogging team, teens participate in the Damn These Heels Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival, watch independent films, and interview filmmakers, advocates, and writers from all over the world. They strive to understand how film can promote just and humane sexual attitudes and policies, challenge current perspectives, and spark new ideas—and you can follow along with their journey here. Check out their reviews from this year’s festivals!
Currently in America, anything related to abortion is controversy. People are throwing about hateful and destructive rhetoric like it’s a football, when in fact these words bear much more similarity to a grenade. If we want to win this battle to preserve access to reproductive healthcare, we have no chance to take a break and stop fighting.
Of all the incredible experiences and films at the Sundance Film Festival this year, one of the most powerful and relevant is Across the Line. This is a virtual reality experiences which gives viewers the opportunity to view and be immersed in the event of having an abortion. The film doesn’t deal with much of the medical aspect of the procedure, but rather the politics of abortion.
While in this reality, you are putting on Christina’s shoes to obtain an abortion. You will witness the comfort of a kind physician, the importance of a supportive friend, and the cruelty that people spread to people trying to access basic health services. Many women who experience this type of harassment outside of health clinics are not even trying to procure an abortion. They are trying to get a pap smear or access contraception.
Utah Teens Talk Film bloggers are members of Planned Parenthood Association of Utah’s Teen Council. They are trained to teach about human sexuality and healthy decision making. During the 2016 Sundance Film Festival teen bloggers will be watching independent films and interviewing filmmakers, advocates, and writers with the goal of understanding how film can promote just and humane sexual attitudes and policies.
When it comes to most issues, I’m very confident in my stance. I feel like I can create an airtight case for why I believe what I believe. I would like to feel the same way about abortion, and especially late term abortions, but I don’t, and until I saw After Tiller that was something I had trouble admitting to myself. The film tells the story of the only four doctors who can and will perform third trimester abortions in the U.S. after the assassination of Dr. Tiller in Kansas, the leading doctor in the field. It’s a story that’s not often told, and what I loved about the movie was that rather than telling you how to feel about the late term abortions, it simply told the important story of the people performing them; their motivations, their struggles, and how it affected their lives. On top of that, it really made me think about how I felt about late term abortions, and the results were inconclusive. As a guy, I feel uncomfortable making judgments about whether a woman should be allowed to get an abortion, but there were also certain cases where my deepest instincts felt like the abortion shouldn’t happen. I think that’s the point of the movie, to make you think about the issue in ways you hadn’t before, no matter what side you’re coming from, and really that should be the point of any documentary. In that regard, and in many others, it’s a great film.
The other teen bloggers and I were lucky enough to get the opportunity to interview the directors, Martha and Lana, and that was great for a lot of reasons. First, they’re still in their twenties and really down to earth and relatable, so talking to them made it feel like WE could be making really cool and thought-provoking documentaries in just a few years. Second, they said some great stuff about how they wanted to illuminate the issue rather than adding flame to the fire, and how surprised they were at the compassion they felt towards the patients, and the complexity of their situations. Finally, they actually cared about what we thought about their movie. I think a lot adults discount any teenage input just because it comes from teenagers. They, on the other hand, were genuinely interested in our opinion, especially on one of the patients they followed, a sixteen-year-old whose fetus had no health defects, and that only encouraged me to think about the movie and the issues more. Even better, it made me realize that the most important thing is not always knowing where I stand on an issue, but instead taking the time to think about it, from multiple angles. It was a great film because it challenged me on multiple levels, forcing me not only to mull over late term abortions, but to analyze the way I think about important and controversial issues.
Sam likes film, discussing sexual health, and blogging about his feelings, so he’s beyond excited to be working on this project.
Check out Planned Parenthood Utah’s Teen Council! They were at the Sundance Film Festival viewing films like Anita, After Tiller, The Square (Al Midan), Valentine Road, Fire in the Blood, Austenland, and Touching the Void. Watch some trailers.
During the festival these teens blogged to examine how film can educate their communities about healthy sexuality. They interviewed filmmakers, advocates and journalists related to the films to learn more about how they’re made. Visit their tumblr to read more!
