For me, a lot of it was about the faces of the kids and what their eyes and expressions could bring to the part that my words alone could never bring. I promised them that I would do the most honest representation possible. In preparation for the start of production, Richard LaGravenese, Hilary Swank and the cast of inexperienced actors playing her students went through an intense rehearsal period.
Throughout the process, the relationships among the kids began to mirror that of their characters as they became more enveloped by the open nature of the film. They slowly began to open up and allowed themselves to fall down and wear their hearts on their sleeve. They began to get to know each other, which mirrored scenes in the movie. It was at this point that the lines between reality and story began to bleed in to each other. We bonded strongly over how those stories affected us.
It was definitely life imitating art at that point. The survivors appear in the film as themselves. Idealistic Erin Gruwell is just starting her first teaching job, that as freshman and sophomore English teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School, which, two years earlier, implemented a voluntary integration program. For many of the existing teachers, the integration has ruined the school, whose previously stellar academic standing has been replaced with many students who will be lucky to graduate or even be literate.
Despite choosing the school on purpose because of its integration program, Erin is unprepared for the nature of her classroom, whose students live by generations of strict moral codes of protecting their own at all cost.
Many are in gangs and almost all know somebody that has been killed by gang violence. The Latinos hate the Cambodians who hate the blacks and so on.
The only person the students hate more is Ms. It isn't until Erin holds an unsanctioned discussion about a recent drive-by shooting death that she fully begins to understand what she's up against. And it isn't until she provides an assignment of writing a daily journal - which will be not graded, and will remain unread by her unless they so choose - that the students begin to open up to her.
As Erin tries harder and harder to have resources provided to teach properly which often results in her needing to pay for them herself through working second and third jobs , she seems to face greater resistance, especially from her colleagues, such as Margaret Campbell, her section head, who lives by regulations and sees such resources as a waste, and Brian Gelford, who will protect his "priviledged" position of teaching the senior honors classes at all cost.
Erin also finds that her teaching job is placing a strain on her marriage to Scott Casey, a man who seems to have lost his own idealistic way in life.
Rated PG for violent content, some thematic material and language. Did you know Edit. Trivia At the hotel dinner for the kids, after their trip to the Holocaust museum, all of the Holocaust survivor characters are played by actual Holocaust survivors. Goofs The scene where Miep Gies tells the day Anne Frank was captured was told with some factual errors.
Gies never went back to her house that very day to get bribery materials. Quotes Miep Gies : But even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can, within their own small ways, turn on a small light in a dark room. User reviews Review. Top review. Sometimes the Pen Does Defeat the Sword.
True story about a young teacher Hilary Swank who comes to a rough part of inner-city Los Angeles in the mids and inspires her high school students through expression via personal writings. A wide range of ethnic and cultural divisions provide difficulties aplenty with gang activity and general mischief being the orders of the day and it is up to Swank to pull through the layers of grief, anger and despair to help her students not only succeed in the classroom, but also in life.
Inspirational and a bit cheesy at the same time, "Freedom Writers" still uses a proved formula to work well for the most part. And her outreach is tremendous. She is a home grown Long Beach product now on a national stage also and, to some degree, international. Jacobs talked about growing up with domestic violence as she moved with her mother from Louisiana to California, eventually winding up homeless. She said she was a shy and reclusive teen until she met Gruwell. Erin created a place where I could feel safe.
She taught us that dreams can come true if we work hard and have a plan. She taught us how to mentor other kids. Gruwell works out of her offices at an historic home she rents on Ocean Boulevard. She still wears the necklace of pearls her father, Stephen Douglas Gruwell, gave her.
I am still their cheerleader, their mentor, their confidante.
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