Manual students at Chipotle, before seeing "Precious"
I help out once a week with the Manual High School Magazine, BOOM! Last night, six volunteers took eight students who work on the magazine to see the Denver premiere of “Precious,” director Lee Daniels’ devastating masterwork about an abused, obese inner-city girl and her travails. The event marked the launch of this year’s Denver Film Festival. The kids dressed up for social event of Denver’s evening, at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House.
Students and their parents had been briefed about the brutal nature of the film’s subject matter — incest, physical and psychological abuse, AIDS, teen pregnancy. One mom chose to accompany her daughter. Still, when the movie ended and we gathered in the lobby for a debrief, the kids appeared glassy-eyed, pulled into themselves. The mother and daughter, African Americans, like the movie’s heroine, clung to each other.
One girl said she didn’t find the film all that shocking because she knew people — not herself — who had experienced some of those same traumas. Driving kids home after the show, volunteer and University of Denver graduate student Iman Jafarynejad, ask our three passengers for their impressions. “It’s giving me flashbacks,” one girl said. We were silent for a while after that.
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