Going on 13

Click here to ask for more information about this project:

Images

Ariana, nine years old, at track practice

Isha in traditional dress at eleven years old

Esmeralda celebrates her 12th birthday

Rosie misses a lot of 6th grade

Website

http://www.goingon13.com

Topics

Human Development: Children, Education, Youth
Human Rights: Gender, Sexuality

Project Geography

US: California
International: North America

Identity Niches

African American, Asian American, Children, Latino, Student, Women, Youth/Teen

Budget

Raised to date: $435,000.00
Estimate to complete: $75,000.00
Total Estimated Budget: $510,000.00
The budget numbers above are accurate as of 01/19/2009

Status

Distribution

Media Type

Video

Project End Use

Key Personnel

Kristy Guevara-Flanagan
Co-Director/Co-Producer
Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, Director/Producer/Writer picked up her first Super-8 camera in middle school and hasn't put the camera down since. She has produced and directed a number of short films including: EL CORRIDO DE CECILIA RIOS, a documentary that chronicles the violent death of fifteen-year-old Cecilia Rios. The film won the Golden Spire Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival, was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival and was subsequently licensed by the Sundance Channel. Since graduating with an MFA in Film Production from San Francisco State University, Kristy has worked as a filmmaker, an arts educator, and a film and video editor. She has served on the board of directors of New Day Films and is an active and enthusiastic participant in the Bay Area's diverse filmmaking community. GOING ON 13 is her first feature-length film.

Dawn Valadez
Co-Director/Co-Producer
Dawn Valadez, Producer/Director/Writer, believes that feminism is a dirty word and she loves dirty words. She works with children, youth and families in a variety of settings and raises resources for community programs, media and the arts. She has created public art and media with youth, developed programs, and trained thousands of people in cultural competency, leadership and youth development. After twenty years of community service she sees the wisdom of producing media for social justice. Dawn lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. GOING ON 13 is her first feature documentary.

Outreach/Engagement Plan(s)

Our outreach plan will build upon the film's appeal (GOING ON 13 has screened at numerous festivals, won best documentary at the LA Femme Film Festival was recognized for a Cine Golden Eagle Award, 2009) and the success that the film has already had in reaching an interested audience. Additionally, our outreach will build towards the film's broadcast on Public Television in Fall 2009.

We know from our years of working with the girls in our film, that girls are accessing information through social network environments, through their mobile phones and iPods, and via the Internet in RPG sites and other sites. GOING ON 13 is embracing this phenomenon and launching an audience engagement plan that places an interactive web site at its core.

Recognizing the popularity of video responses to original video content at websites such as You Tube, our premise is that GOING ON 13 can provide an effective and safe online portal for viewers to upload and share short videos about themselves. This process will extend GOING ON 13’s central theme - the disconnect between youth and adults.

Girls Inc of Alameda County in particular is interested in working with us in connection to their work with National Science Foundation and the Stanford Research Institute that focuses on training middle school and youth high schools how to use technology, and create interactive games, websites, web 2.0 and social networking projects. We have begun discussions with them on creating partnership with the girls trained in their program to work with us and our designer to create the safe and interactive projects. Groups that have agreed to partner with us to create pilot content as well as to review and give feedback on the website include Girls Inc; Children NOW; Girls for a Change; Powerful Voices; the Lower East Side Girls Club; Big Brothers, Big Sisters; and the New Moon Magazine editorial team. Via their active participation they will help us create a supportive and safe environments for girls and young women.

Our working concept which we know/anticipate will evolve with the participation of the girls groups’ is this: Users will be asked to respond to prompts, each with it’s own mission of promoting dialogue and debate: one amongst children and parents, one amongst educators and students and one amongst pre-teens and their peers.

• What I would tell my parents…” is a prompt that would create an intergenerational dialogue about the difficulties youth and parents have in communicating with and understanding each other.

• “What you don’t know about me…” will allow educators and students to understand each other in new ways free from the confines of institutional roles and stereotypes.

• “Where I come from…” will provide pre-teens and their peers a portal into familial and ethnic cultures that they might not ever see at school.

The partners, girls groups, caregivers and teachers/ youth workers listed above will create these elements for the first video chain letter and give us feedback on the overall process.

We are also in discussion with Working Films about including GOING ON 13 in a multi-day audience engagement conference focused on films about and for girls including Saving Jackie, Body Typed, Very Young Girls, Kick Like a Girl, Children In No Man's Land and other topical films.

The draft idea is to bring together these films/filmmakers who are all working with core partners on audience engagement campaigns that like the films are collectively focused on girls health, welfare, growth, development, body/self image, education and empowerment. The conference would be as much a show and tell as it is a test for how to cross fertilize amongst the organizations focusing on a common theme.

Funders

Name	Amount	Date
The Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media	$10,000.00	01/15/2009
The Fledgling Fund	$20,000.00	01/15/2009
Center for Cultural Innovation	$5,000.00	03/06/2008
Latino Public Broadcasting	$40,000.00	07/09/2007
Chicken and Egg Pictures	$17,500.00	05/04/2007
Independent Television Service	$190,000.00	10/04/2006
California Council for the Humanities: The California Story Fund	$40,000.00	02/08/2006
The City of Oakland Cultural Arts Fund	$4,999.00	10/17/2005
The City of Oakland Cultural Arts Fund	$4,999.00	12/31/2003
California Women's Foundation	$10,000.00	06/27/2003
Pioneer Fund	$4,000.00	12/22/2002
Open Meadows Foundation	$500.00	07/09/2001
The Fleishhacker Foundation	$3,500.00	06/01/2001

Location

1617 32nd St. #B
Oakland, CA, 94608

See Google Maps

Short Synopsis

Description/Treatment

GOING ON 13 is a finished feature film in distribution, seeking outreach support to be aired on Public Television Fall 2009. To date the film has premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, screened internationally, been used at conferences, in colleges, and with community groups to engage with the contemporary issues facing girls of color.

Four girls, four years, and the change of a lifetime.

GOING ON 13 is an award-winning feature documentary that explores the lives of four pre-teen girls growing up in urban America. Without flinching, GOING ON 13 allows us to see what real girls face during this pivotal time of puberty, while providing a vehicle for discussing important developmental milestones. Meet Ariana, Isha, Rosie and Esme as they let go of childhood and fumble – or sprint – toward an uncertain future. This is puberty and for each of these girls of color, it’s a whirlwind of change and new choices as they negotiate the precarious moments between being a little girl and becoming a young woman.

Meet Esmeralda, Mexican American, first to complete her daily schoolwork and also first in her class to have a “boyfriend” without her parents’ knowledge; Ariana, African American, who transforms from a tomboy into one of the “popular girls” as her family struggles to leave the poverty of West Oakland; Rosie, mixed race Latina, who, at nine, is precocious and sunny, but grows into an alienated pre-teen who may have to repeat the sixth grade due to chronic truancy; and Isha, an immigrant from India, who despite her devotion to her traditional family, explores Internet teen chat-rooms with user names like “ghetto girl” and “cutie pie.”

Using a mix of intimate interviews, cinema vérité, and stop-motion animation, GOING ON 13 chronicles the girls’ coming of age: their blossoming desires and growing sense of responsibility, their hopes for the future, their difficulties learning how to love themselves, and the escalating tug-of-war between who they want to become and who their parents think they should be. We hear the girls talk about themselves. They take us into their world, with the music, television, digital media and books they adoringly ingest – and that rarely reflect their own families’ economic or cultural backgrounds – providing texture, context, and contrast for the social and emotional challenges they face.

GOING ON 13 shows us a reality far more complex than what we are used to seeing in the media about pre-teen girls and urban girls of color. Without simplifying or sensationalizing their lives, we come to see these four girls as multi-faceted and gripping individuals. Through the everyday drama of their changing lives, Isha, Rosie, Esme and Ariana remind us that it is the small moments of insight that usher us down the rough road from childhood to adulthood.

Our vision: by sharing their experiences in a secure and adult-curated environment, girls will be able to learn from and connect to those that relate best to them: other pre-teen girls. In turn, our film will be able to reach a larger audience – particularly urban girls of color and their families – who don’t traditionally consume documentary media. Showing the lives of real, non-sensationalized, girls of color is revolutionary and will lead to new ways of girls seeing themselves and being seen by those people who are responsible for them.