Julie
Crinière
jcriniere@mac.com
I
am both a documentary filmmaker and an educator. I think these
two roles enrich each other. I love being part of the Blinktank
collaborative, where people of very diverse backgrounds meet
to exchange ideas, support each other and collaborate on socially
oriented media projects.
I currently live and work in New York
City, where I direct the Youth Organizer's TV (YO-TV) program
for the Educational Video Center (EVC). YO-TV selects young
people who wish to continue making documentaries after they
have graduated from EVC's high school documentary program and
pays them a stipend. (For more information, see www.evc.org.)
Currently, my students and I are working on a documentary follow-up
study of youth in the foster care system, who were the subject
of an EVC video eight years ago. Last year YO-TV produced a
video on teen indebtedness, which took a critical look at the
credit card industry and the consequences of embracing the "buy
now pay later" philosophy. I'm continuing to work on this subject
by becoming a co-producer - with
Tim Wright and
Jasmin Sung of
the independent documentary
Plastic: Credit
Cards and the Culture of Debt, currently
in progress.
I
just came back from teaching at the Sitka Fine Arts
Camp from June 12 to June 28. This camp was selected
as one of the top 10 camps in the country by the NEA. Sitka
is considered Alaska's most beautiful seaside town and I left
the stench and heat of NYC with no second thoughts. I taught
one documentary class and two basic video classes to eager students
from 12 to 17 year old. There are 200 students in the whole
camp and they can choose from a wide array of art disciplines.
It was a very intense program, teaching every day for 10 days,
from 8 am to 4 pm. This was followed by student and artist performances
in the evening. Some students would come to my class after a
salsa class and tell me how shooting video was just like salsa
dancing where "you move your legs and your hips but you
keep your torso straight". It was a great synaesthetic
experience for all of us. Despite the numerous crashes of the
PCs we used for editing and countless other technical difficulties
that kept popping up every step of the way, we had a successful
screening of students' work at the end. Also the documentary
we made about the camp will be used as an evaluation tool for
the NEA to help secure more funding for next year. I can’t
wait to go back. Next year I want the documentary class to explore
Sitka's rich past which is a unique blend of Tlingit culture
and Russian history.
I
first got involved with filmmaking four years ago when I interned
at Documentary
Educational Resources (DER),
a house in Boston, which produces and distributes ethnographic
films. Because I am bi-cultural and tri-lingual, DER sent me
to the Mostra documentary film festival in Brazil to meet international
filmmakers and acquire films for American distribution.
Subsequently, in collaboration with
Lu Chih-Lan, a Taiwanese grassroots activist, I started making
documentaries about immigrant teenagers in American Public Schools.
This experience made me want to give cameras to the teenagers
so they could tell their own stories. So Lu and I created a
"Media As a Second Language" program, which we implemented
in several Boston public schools. We also collaborated with
a Harvard Education School study on immigration to create a
"Call for Art: Collaboration for Action, Representation and
Transformation." In it, we worked with immigrant children
to combine poetry, theater and video. We also designed a media
literacy project for the YWCA's Youth Voice Collaborative.
Concurrently, I was getting a Master's
degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, after which
I took a job at Children's Hospital in the VIA program teaching
chronically ill teens to document their daily lives on video.
I subsequently edited the footage and created an interactive
CD-ROM to help medical staff better understand the day to day
struggles of their patients.
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