Freedom Writers (2007)

Freedom Writers is a 2007 movie starring Hilary Swank, Patrick Dempsey and others. Erin Gruwell (Swank) gets the job of teaching English for freshman year in Wilson High School. She is faced with a group of students racially divided who have mutual hatred and also disrespect her. In one of her classes she catches a few students making fun of an African American student by drawing a caricature of him with a fat lip. She then describes how Jews were suppressed in the same way and talks on about how a holocaust happens.



The exact words being:
Maybe we should talk about art. Tito's got real talent, don't you think? You know something? I saw a picture just like this once, in a museum. Only it wasn't a black man, it was a Jewish man. And instead of the big lips he had a really big nose, like a rat's nose. But he wasn't just one particular Jewish man. This was a drawing of all Jews. And these drawings were put in the newspapers by the most famous gang in history. You think you know all about gangs? You're amateurs. This gang will put you all to shame. And they started out poor and angry and everybody looked down on them. Until one man decided to give them some pride, an identity... and somebody to blame. You take over neighborhoods? That's nothing compared to them. They took over countries. You want to know how? They just wiped out everybody else. Yeah, they wiped out everybody they didn't like and everybody they blamed for their life being hard. And one of the ways they did it was by doing this: see, they print pictures like this in the newspapers, Jewish people with big, long noses... blacks with big, fat lips. They'd also published scientific evidence that proved that Jews and blacks were the lowest form of human species. Jews and blacks were more like animals. And because they were just like animals it didn't matter if they lived or died. In fact, life would be a whole lot better if they were all dead. That's how a holocaust happens. And that's what you all think of each other.

When she asks the class if they knew what that holocaust was, except for the sheepish yes of the only white student in the classroom, nobody had any idea. The movie then is mostly about how she gets the students to read Anne Frank's Diary amongst other books. The students finally begin to relate to all these literary works and slowly calm the anger built into them over many years. She also encourages them to write their thoughts in a diary and finally compile is calling is The Freedom Writers Diary as a reference to Freedom Riders (who were the black and white civil rights activists who were the first to test out the U.S. Supreme Court decision to desegregate the interstate buses in 1961) and Freedom Fighters.



The movie has been based on a book The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them by The Freedom Writers with Erin Gruwell.

There are many quotes in the movie that leave a deep impact. Some of my favourite one's were:
Jamal: At sixteen, I've seen more bodies than a mortician. Every time I step out my door I face the risk of being shot. To the rest of the world it's just another dead body on a street corner. They don't know that he was my friend.

Brandy: In every war, there is an enemy. I watched my mother being hlaf-beaten to death, and watched as bloodand tears streamed down her face. I felt useless and scared, and furious at the same time. I can still feel the sting of the belt on my back and my legs. One time he couldn't pay the rent. That night he stopped us on the street and pointed to the concrete. He said, "pick a spot."

Marcus: Clive was my boy. He had my back plenty of times. Me and him was like one fist. One army.
[Clive pulls a gun out of a paper bag and accidentally shoots himself]
Marcus: I sat there until the police came. But when they come, all they see is a dead body, a gun, and a nigger. They took me to juvenile hall. First night was the scariest. Inmates banging on the walls, throwing up gang signs, yelling out who they were and where they from. I cried my first night. I never let anybody know that. I spent the next few years in and out of cells. Every day I worry, when will I be free?

On the whole, it is a very touching and an inspirational movie. A must see.