Indiewire featured Sarah Feinbloom as a Woman to Watch. See below for a portion of the interview, or click here to read the full article.
It was 1992, and the Rodney King riots were being felt across the country, especially amongst the high school students filing into Sarah Feinbloom’s Ancient History class at Boston Latin School in Massachusetts.
“My students were riled by the riots. They couldn’t concentrate. I felt like what I was teaching was irrelevant. What they really wanted to talk about were issues of police brutality, violence in their neighborhoods, the fact that they couldn’t sleep because they heard gunshots in the night, and they were scared.”
Feinbloom veered off the curriculum and started talking with her class about civil rights, and soon she and her students were collaborating on her first film, "Youth to Youth: A Video About Violence." With no film school experience, Sarah improvised as she went along.“
I wanted my students to cultivate a deeper understanding of how personal and systemic violence affects them and even in small ways do something themselves to prevent it. So we went out together and interviewed students, police officers, a Vietnam veteran, a rape survivor, and created segments about the ways people confront and experience violence. I was hooked on documentaries after that. I saw how important it was for young people to be able to tell their own stories and have safe spaces where they could discuss what was really going on in their lives.”
See the full article