A Girl Like Me
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Pairing: None Description
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Commentary
Kiri Davis states—I knew from an early age that film was a medium I wanted to work in. Through my films I’ve found a way of expressing myself as well as telling the stories that are important to me. At sixteen, I directed my first documentary, A Girl Like Me. Before that, I created numerous short films and attended the New York Film Academy.
For my high-school literature class I was constructing an anthology with a wide range of different stories that I believed reflected the black girl’s experience. For the different chapters, I conducted interviews with a variety of black girls in my high school, and a number of issues surfaced concerning the standards of beauty imposed on today’s black girls and how this affects their self-image.Kiri has created a wonderful, but heartbreaking, seven minute film that has young, black children choosing between two dolls—one black, one white—in response to a number of questions. What reveals itself, very rapidly, is how young children learn that black is bad, less beautiful, less intelligent, and a host of other unattractive traits. The one scene when the little girl decides to select which doll she resembles, but hesitates almost made me weep. She had just finished indicating that the white doll was more attractive and good; while the black doll was bad. And you could tell she wanted to choose the white doll to describe herself, but even at that age (maybe 5 or 6 years old), she already knew that black described her, and she seemed disheartened by it.
I thought this topic would make an interesting film and so when I was accepted into the Reel Works Teen Filmmaking program, I set out to explore these issues. I also decided to would reconduct the “doll test” initially conducted by Dr. Kenneth Clark, which was used in the historic desegregation case, Brown vs. Board of Education. I thought that by including this experiment in my film, I would shed new light on how society affects black children today and how little has actually changed.For me, almost other scenes where secondary leading up to that telling moment. It was as if the little girl had verbally stated, I don't want to be unattractive, unintelligent, and bad; but I know that I'm black. Wow! A sixteen year old filmed this. Amazing.
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Comments
- On 09/23/2007, says:
This is amazing! Who would know?