The Interrupters!

So at True False I made it to a screening of The Interrupters. This movie was extremely intense. The film documented the efforts of a Chicago based organization that tries to stop violence among the most intense Chicago Gangs. The group is called The Violence Interrupters, and they also work along side a group called 'cease fire,' which also tries to save lives from gang related violence. I think this group is really interesting and innovative because they realize, being ex gang members themselves, that there is no way to really get rid of gangs. They focus more on simply trying to mediate, and teach these young people how to deal with anger and confrontation in alternative ways other than violence.
This group realizes that violence is a learned behavior, and most of these kids have been raised by parents who would beat them/slap them for anything that they did wrong while they were growing up. This has caused them to immediately go to violence to teach a lesson, because the effects are immediate. Unfortunately, this often causes much more violence in retaliation, and these miniature urban wars are started.
I was really inspired by one of the main characters, Ameena. She is such a strong person, and she comes from a rough background herself. It is really amazing that she came from a background where her father was a famous gang leader, and was raised by her mother where she was physically, emotionally and sexually abused. She went through a lot and got into a lot of trouble herself, eventually being a leader in a gang in Chicago. Despite all of this, she now uses all of her knowledge to help people in similar positions that she once was in. She knows how to talk to the kids in a way that they can understand and take seriously. She is a very persuasive speaker and she does a great job of calming people down to avoid violence. I really respect that she doesn't use her past as an excuse. She has bettered herself rather than sitting and complaining about the cards that fate dealt her. One character in this documentary, Caprysha, was a girl in a very bad situation. She basically had to start raising her younger siblings when she was 10 years old. She never really got a childhood, and now she is having a hard time living a normal successful life, because she is fighting with drug addictions. I really hope that she ends up really learning from her past, and uses it to empower herself, rather than using it as a crutch like she seemed to do through out this film.
One part of the film that really opened my eyes to an issue that I was pretty much completely ignorant to, was the video of the young man who was killed in front of his high school. I had never heard of this incident, and in general just unaware of this crazy urban war going on in Chicago. This video really shook me up. And Ameena pointed out the fact that was going through my head when I saw it, which was "I hope his mom didn't have to see this." It seems insane that there it took a video like that to convince the government to help out with all the violence. I guess it takes something really extreme to get peoples' attention these days though, with all the other awful things that seem to be going on in the world.
Overall, I was really impressed with this doc (not that I was expecting anything less after seeing Hoop Dreams), because it really made me think about this issue in depth, and it really taught me something that is going on in America that I didn't really know anything about. I think that this film will help open more peoples' eyes to this issue and maybe cause something to be done to help support these mediators, and think of new ways to stop the violence in the future.