Saying what hasn’t been said: Creative Youth Center, Noir to premiere new film
The first viewing of “Unspoken” at Wealthy Theatre, this Thursday April 12, will include a Q&A with its creators—most of whom are 11 or 12 years old.
This Thursday, April 12, “Unspoken” will premiere at Wealthy Theatre’s Koning Micro Cinema. The film, a collaboration between the Creative Youth Center (CYC) and Noir, will be followed by a Q&A with its creators, most of whom are between 11 and 12 years old.
Brianne Carpenter, who teaches at CYC, sprung it one day on her all-girl class: they were going to make a movie.
Every year, each class has a project of some sort. These projects always incorporate writing, but not just essays or stories.
“We love cross-genre collaborations,” Carpenter says. Cherish Pittman, a junior board member and GVSU film student, offered to assist in creating a short film. Carpenter lept on it.
The students worked collaboratively, not through democracy but consensus. Charlie White, owner of consulting agency Adaptive Capacity, spent time with the class, explaining how consensus works (how it works: well, but slowly). Everyone got to be involved; everyone contributed.
“What a victory for a group of middle school girls,” Carpenter said.
Together, they wrote the screenplay. It focused on the fact that everyone has some pain, or some secret, that they’re keeping to themselves — “something other people don’t have access to.” It’s a natural subject for middle school students to take on; memoirist Samantha Abeel wrote of life at 13 that “false faces were the rule.”
Conversations about the process caused other issues to surface. Harvey Weinstein came up, inevitably.
“Once you create a safe space where students are engaged with writing,” Carpenter said, “So many other deep conversations happen.”
The movie business was and is a boy’s club; for every Agnes Varda or Sofia Coppola, there are a hundred girls who didn’t want to force their way through the gates, or who were discouraged from doing so, or prevented.
“The history of cinema is boys photographing girls,” Jean-Luc Godard said. (An improvement on the history of history, which he described as “boys burning girls at the stake”). That’s less true now but still truer than it should be.
The students, unbowed by this history, persisted. Their film was to be titled “Unspoken.” Each character would have something inside that she hadn’t said, but each would also have a victory.
Screenplay complete, the students, Carpenter, Pittman, and Pittman’s friend and partner Nyia Slade gathered at Grand Valley State University and shot the film in one day. Everyone had a job to do, and, over the course of six hours, all jobs were done.
“What surprised us most was the determination and drive behind these students,” Pittman says. “Their professionalism was impeccable and we would work with them again any day.”
Zoe, a student, says she loved creating the characters. She also said it had its challenging parts.
“We couldn’t add too much character development in a three-minute film,” she explains. Fellow student Aremoni shares that getting out of bed before 9 a.m. on a Saturday was not easy. But she did, and is glad she did.
None of this would have happened without Creative Youth Center or Noir. Carpenter, who clearly admires her students’ creativity and awareness of social issues, describes the Creative Youth Center as her dream place.
“I wish a place like that had existed when I was an elementary school, middle school or high school student,” she says. “It’s special. I would have absolutely loved it.”
Pittman, co-founder with Slade of the film collective Noir, sees the project as fitting squarely within Noir’s mission.
“That’s what Noir is about: creating opportunities for positive representation, in front of and behind the camera,” says Pittman.
“These children reminded us what it means to dream and achieve what you set out to do,” Pittman continues. “We are very proud of them and very excited to show the community what these young ladies are capable of.”
See “Unspoken” at the red carpet film premiere
Thursday, April 12
7–8 p.m.
Wealthy Theatre
1130 Wealthy Street SE
Fancy attire is optional, but encouraged. This event is free and will be open for all ages.
