Colorado teens debut stories of belonging, “dark corners” of childhood through documentary program

Cynniah Mack loves coming-of-age stories. Her favorite is “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” a 1999 novel and 2012 film, both written by Stephen Chbosky.

The 17-year-old said she relates to the story’s main character, Charlie. She understands his trouble making friends, his family dynamics. She also likes his character arc. “He learns how to be a wallflower, how to embrace being a wallflower,” Mack said. “Also Emma Watson is in it.”

Mack is just days away from debuting her own film, a 14-minute documentary that she created as part of this year’s Youth Documentary Academy, a summer program that trains 12 students to tell their stories through a combination of technical skills, narrative craft and a little dash of therapy.

Her film chronicles the years she spent moving between women’s shelters with her mother in Colorado Springs. More than anything, it’s a documentary about their relationship, Mack said.

“I want other mother-daughters to see it and say, ‘Hey, we’re kind of like that. We’ve gone through something similar. We’ve gone through hard times together, and we can persevere and get through that,’” Mack said.

She interviewed her mother for the film, and cut that footage with phone videos she took as a kid, a way of “getting back at her mom” for always filming her and their cats. “In a joking way,” Mack said. “I was saying ‘I can film stuff and make these documentaries, too.’”

She never thought she’d actually make a documentary out of the footage.

Most of the students who join the program don’t have experience with filmmaking. The program is free for the students, funded by a collection of organizations. 

Some arrive with a story idea, others with interviewing experience, and some don’t really know why they’re there at all. 

“I didn’t even want to be in YDA, I didn’t want to apply or anything, but my (school) principal talked me into it,” said Dee Purvis, a freshman at Pikes Peak State College, who created a film about his experience as one of three adopted Black children in a white family. “But now that I think about it, it was probably the best thing that could have ever happened.”

Mack, Purvis and nine other students will screen their documentaries for the first time — for each other and for the public — this Sunday at the Edith Kinney Gaylord Cornerstone Arts Center in Colorado Springs.

Be a stone wall

The Youth Documentary Academy was founded in 2014 by Tom Shepard, who grew up in Colorado Springs then left for California and found his way into the film industry.

While living in the San Francisco Bay area he saw “The Times of Harvey Milk,” a 1984 documentary about California’s first openly gay public official, elected in 1977 and assassinated in 1978. He said the film changed his life.

He “tore up” his medical school application and started hanging around filmmakers, he said, later interning with people including Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, who directed and produced the Harvey Milk documentary.

Then he started making his own documentaries, including “Scout’s Honor,” about a 12-year-old Boy Scout who campaigned against the organization’s anti-gay policies. The film premiered at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival where it won an audience award for Best Documentary.

“When I was growing up, my generation didn’t talk about anything,” Shepard said. “Now I think our young people are kind of leading the way in terms of harnessing a craft that allows them to say the quiet things out loud.”

On the first day of class, the 12 students gathered in a circle and told their stories one by one. Things got vulnerable very quickly, Madilynn Simington, a 17-year-old filmmaker, said. “We all said things that we probably have never said to anybody before.”

For 18-year-old StanLee Love, who was named after the Marvel creator and writes his own graphic novels, that meant sifting through feelings of depression and not fitting in. Love has always been “a weird kid,” he said. “I’ve always felt like, you know, things aren’t real, I’m not real, I just don’t fit in very much.”

He decided to make a movie about that feeling.

“I believe Gen Z as a whole, we don’t really talk about what’s going on in our lives because we were COVID babies. We spent two years inside just talking to text on screen instead of actually talking about how we feel,” Love said. “Men especially are taught to withhold all their emotions, just be like a stoic stone wall.”

Expanding the circle

The program’s curriculum emphasizes the skills it takes to make a movie: camera settings, boom mics, shoulder rigs.

But it is also teaching the students how to create a narrative from their own stories. They learn about three-act structures, character arcs and conflict resolution. Shepard thinks that transposing the students’ experiences onto those structures allows them to interrogate their lives with a bit of distance.

“Something about this medium, first-person-point-of-view filmmaking, allows young people to kind of take something that was previously taboo or shameful and kind of flip it, and suddenly they have some agency,” he said.

Simington used the opportunity to ask the adults in her life questions about her mother, who died by suicide when Simington was 2 years old. Almost 16 years later, she said that she feels ready to really understand who her mom was.

She interviewed her dad and aunts, and the blurry image of her mom started to sharpen. But as personal as the project is, ultimately she hopes that it will have meaning beyond her family. She has already found ways to talk about suicide prevention with her teachers and friends by explaining the concept of her movie.

“The name of my film is ‘A Letter to You,’” Simington said. “For me, it’s a letter to my mom. But ‘You’ can be so many different people. I want it to help prevent things in the future. My story can maybe help others see that they are not alone.”

The academy partners with mental health specialists to provide a scaffolding around their training and events. They bring behavioral health and crisis services like Diversus Health, Peak View and Cedar Springs to set up tables at their screenings, including the one Sunday, to nudge people toward resources.

And how are the students feeling about the Sunday screening? Nervous. Anxious. Terrified. Excited.

“November 15th. That’s a date that’s been at the back of my mind for about four months now,” Love said. “And it’s right around the corner. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Just like the first day, the students know they have each other and the academy team to lean on. Now it’s time to open the circle a little wider.

“They’re dealing with some darker corners or childhood trauma, and it’s a really interesting thing that happens, when there’s some distance,” Shepard said. “If you’re going to tell your own story, why not make yourself the hero?”