Today was our first day at Sundance and I was pleased that both of the documentaries we saw were going to be great discussion material later on in the classroom.

First up we saw A Small Act.

A SMALL ACT documentary trailer from Patti Lee on Vimeo.

I really liked the movie and thought it did a great job of showing how generational poverty and lack of education contributes to the other problems in developing parts of the world. I think it will be a great jumping off point for classroom discussion about privilege and access to resources. After the movie the director talked about how she became familiar with the story because she spent some time in Kenya in college and became good friends with one of the women involved in starting the scholarship fund. Last week the Hands on a Camera students talked to the kids about finding a good story and about looking around at the people in the various communities they are part of to find a story to tell and I thought this was such a great example of that idea.

The second documentary we saw was Space Tourists.

Again, the movie itself had a lot of content that could be interesting for classroom discussions about history--particularly the role of the space race on the cold war-- as well discussions about technologies environmental impacts and the cost/benefit analysis of pursuing space travel on a large scale, but I think the most interesting stuff came from the director's q&a. He talked about a part of the film that shows scavengers who go out and collect the rocket boosters and salvage them for scrap metals and the difficulty they had in obtaining permission from the Russian government to film these scavengers. He said the government wanted them to film a staged scavenging with government employees in the roles, he was disgusted by the idea and talked about how it would have ruined the film. I thought this was very interesting information because it highlights how much we as the audience rely on the director to be truthful. If the film says documentary then we expect to see actual events not staged re-enactments, but why is that? I hope this incident will lead to an interesting discussion about the need for critical thinking when viewing media and help facilitate student's understanding of how texts are impacted by who creates them and for what purposes they are created.