Swagger at SKHS
The URI French Film Festival comes to SK students
Students discuss Swagger with URI professor, Leslie Kemp.
Swagger on the big screen in the SKHS auditorium
SKHS, Westerly HS, Narragansett HS and East Greenwich HS ready to watch Swagger.
Today South Kingstown High School and the French department partnered with URI's annual French Film Festival to bring an important, award winning documentary to our French students. This event was shared with three other local high schools, East Greenwich, Narragansett and Westerly, with about 120 students and 5 teachers in attendance. Professor Leslie Kemp along with Chelsea Fox, a student ambassador of the URI French program, facilitated discussions both before and after the film challenging students to analyse and synthesize this impactful documentary.
https://youtu.be/HNniWa-uM2E
The Film
In the 2016 film Swagger, by Parisian filmmaker Olivier Babinet, an undercurrent of fictionalized plot lines pulls the story through the surface of reality. Swagger is the collective story of eleven youths negotiating growing up in Aulnay-sous-Bois, one of the most underserved communities in France. The neighborhood is less than nine miles from France’s Kilometre Zero, at the entrance of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, but socio-economically it is light years away. Rather than showing us poor black and Arab adolescents ensnared by a drab, alienated, violent world, Babinet gives them the dignity of transcending and transforming their environment with their dreams, hopes, and above all their individuality.
Teaching Resources
Students at SKHS have been discussing this film over the past week in their French classes. Some of the cross-content topics brought to the forefront by this documentary are European and African history, social and racial justice, politics and media literacy. The following pdf from SFF Film Education includes poignant discussion topics along with film reviews and publications placing Swagger into historical and political context.
Leah Crescenzo
French Teacher at South Kingstown HS
Email: lcrescenzo@sksd-ri.net
Website: http://hs.skschools.net/
Phone: (401) 360-1000
Twitter: @CrescenzoMme