Freedom Writers

Freedom Writers (2007) follows a young teacher assigned to a Long Beach high school in 1994. Her class is divided along gang lines and the students do not speak to each other. She hands out notebooks and asks them to write their own lives. The whole transformation happens in those notebooks. It is a true story. The teacher was Erin Gruwell, and what her students wrote was published in 1999 as The Freedom Writers Diary. They chose the name themselves, after the Freedom Riders who took buses into the South in the sixties. One of the books read in that classroom was Anne Frank's diary. The students inviting Miep Gies, who hid Anne Frank, to visit the school also happened. Richard LaGravenese wrote and directed it. Hilary Swank leads, with Patrick Dempsey and Imelda Staunton. It runs 123 minutes. Good for: adaptations of real events, stories about teaching, and films about what writing is for. Less good for: this is a textbook instance of the white saviour narrative and earns that criticism. Most of the students are written as a group to be saved rather than as individuals. The emotional prompting is frequent and obvious.