Video Outlet: Casablanca Entertainment, Klein Windhoek
Film: THE FREEDOM WRITERS
Director:
Screenplay:
Players: Hilary Swank, Patrick Dempsey, Imelda Staunton; Scott Glenn
Genre: true-life drama
Rating: ****
There have been several films which have embraced true stories of how a teacher with passion can turn around a class from a bad neighbourhood. Some have been excellent; others have sunk with barely a syrupy ripple of interest.

The exceptional quality of Hilary Swank’s acting as Erin Grewell, the teacher, combined with the spontaneity and gritty edge of the group of students with bad attitude, makes this film among the best in the genre.
The film is set in the early ‘90’s, within 2 years of the Rodney King incident; racial relations in the United States, therefore, are at low ebb. It was a fluid period of socio-economic shifts, where minority groups of all kinds were shifting uneasily, like tectonic plates heading for a trauma. The beginning of the film sets the scene with brutal realism: of a school formerly an A listed state institution, which, because of a liberal programme called ‘The Voluntary Integration Programme’ had turned it within 2 years into a nightmare shelter for dysfunctional teenagers, mostly from minority groups. The English Head of Department laments the loss of 75% of the strongest students.
As if this were not difficult enough for teachers at the school, the warring factions within these groups and the philosophy of ‘looking after one’s one kind only’ turned the school into a battleground, both literally and metaphorically. “We kill each other for race, pride and respect,” intones Eva, one of the principal students. The students also kill for territory.  This may sound somewhat melodramatic, but when Erin Grewell, groping to find ways to communicate meaningfully with her students, plays The Line Game, the reality of their lives becomes apparent. In this game, she asks questions of the whole class; if their response to the question is affirmative, they are asked to stand on the line which has been drawn down the centre of the classroom. When she asks the students who knows of someone shot dead, the entire class, barring the lone Aryan boy, stands firmly on the line. A majority of the class is still standing on the line for 3 friends killed in violence. They are united only by one thing: a hatred for white people.
Their lives are hard in many ways, as the film details: apart from the gangs and gang-related violence (which does not respect the border of the adult world) their home lives are fragmented, brutal and also dysfunctional. The English Department head advises against giving homework on the grounds that most of the students spend 90 minutes each way on public transport simply to reach the school. She advises against most of the set works on the curriculum because she states that the students will either lose or deface them: she would rather the books remain neatly stacked in the store cupboard, presumably for the day when the Voluntary Integration Programme is pronounced a failure and the school returns to its former glories.