Skyland Community High students film teenagers' views of Five Points

Nancy Mitchell, Rocky Mountain News

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Given the chance to make a movie, Justin Pope turned the camera on his own northeast Denver neighborhood and recorded the gentrification of Five Points from a teenager's point of view:

Black-owned businesses with "For Sale" signs in their windows. A "hipster sighting" - a new white resident dancing on her front porch. Luxury lofts going up in the historic heart of the once all-black community.

"Some people call it making a better city," Pope, 19, says in his movie, a baseball cap cocked sideways on his head as he stands in front of a newer white-owned restaurant. "Others see it as destroying the black community."

Pope was one of a dozen students at Skyland Community High School, a Denver charter school at 3240 Humboldt St., who were set loose in Five Points in January and given the opportunity to produce films in time for a public screening tonight.

Their movies - which also include looks at the state's school testing program and at a halfway house for female inmates - offer a different perspective, coming from novice filmmakers who are mostly young, minority and low-income.

And that, said Lisa Lusero, of Deproduction: The (denverevolution) Production Group, is exactly the point.

"This program is about teaching them to use media tools to be a voice for community change," Lusero said. "It's about learning a meaningful tool for civic engagement."

Deproduction, which operates community access media production facilities in Denver, was among eight companies across the nation to receive $20,000 grants from the Community Technology Centers' Net to work with youths on social issues.

Lusero, the group's education director, and co-teacher Stephen Brackett worked with Skyland students who were completing internships. Some students had little technology experience - they had to set up e-mail accounts for them - while others, such as Angelo Sharp, 17, started making movies in middle school.

Students were divided into two groups and told to explore Five Points. Sharp, who lives in Montbello, and his group stumbled across The Matthews Center, founded by former pro football player Bo Matthews.

Fourteen women recently released from jail and prison share a modest cream-and-rose-colored house. In the film, resident Bobbi Ortiz becomes tearful as she talks about how the center helped her adjust after serving nearly 10 years in prison.

"I didn't have anywhere to go," she says, "I would have gone straight back to the streets."

Instead, she's the "house mom" at the center, where she has lived more than a year, and has a steady job.

Sharp said he was drawn to the center as a film subject because he has relatives who also have had to transition from inmate to resident. Everyone's experience is different.

"You can't stereotype," he said Wednesday as he edited his video. "This is helping people understand that everybody is not the same."

Pope, who was born and raised in Five Points, said "there's no way I couldn't do a movie about gentrification."

Movie premieres

• Three 10-minute films created by students will be shown at 7 tonight at the Starz FilmCenter on the Auraria campus, 900 Auraria Parkway.

• Admission is free but donations to Deproduction: The (denverevolution) Production Group are welcome. The group provides public access media production facilities and helps underrepresented communities learn to use technology.

• To learn more, go on to www.deproduction.org.

See the films on the Rocky Mountain News Web site, at www.rockymountainnews.com starting at 8 a.m. Friday.