Alaska youth filmmaking organization celebrates new possibilities with new publication
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - Alaska youth-made films are multiplying every year online.
See Stories, which became a nonprofit in 2019 with staff spread across Alaska, specializes in media training for Title I teachers and students across Alaska through workshops and online communities.
The organization grew out of founder Marie Acemah’s drive to connect Alaska youth to their respective stories through digital filmmaking workshops. The hope is for students to “have power over their own story,” something that Acemah wished she could have explored while she was still in high school.
“I realized that that is what makes a young person tick, is the power over their own story,” Acemah said. “So coming back to my home state after kind of having different experiences abroad made me feel like I want to give that gift to kids around the state.”
And while the reach of their media outreach has been impressive — about 30 schools and hundreds of students — they have hopes for further growth with the release of a new curriculum.
“Young people are doing TikTok, they’re doing reels, they are on social media, that’s what makes them excited so … how do we take that and make it an opportunity," Acemah said.
The curriculum includes strategies for identifying stories that students care about. Acemah says the new curriculum helps organize this process, in addition to teaching technical skills around interviewing, operating a camera and editing.
“We were really grateful to get funding from [Alaska Department of Education & Early Development] and we spent two years with a team of culture bearers, area experts to build out what I feel is a really powerful curriculum that’s now being unrolled,” she said.
The organization’s mission has been refined with each year as the organization has grown from a single summer filmmaking workshop in Kodiak, according to Acemah.
“Before 2019, See Stories took a lot of different forms and at that time I was doing it as a contractor,” she said. “So I would write myself into grants and then I saw that the idea of doing film workshops with youth had legs.”
The curriculum is free when you sign up for an online account. And while the lessons are designed to guide Alaska teachers and students through the storytelling process, Acemah said anyone can access the material.
See Stories alumni are beginning to receive wider recognition.
Last month, Wrangell teens Jackson Pearson and Silje Morse showed off their respective documentaries at the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival. In a few weeks, Angoon’s Angel Jack and Justice Duncan will have their work shown at the Hawaii International Film Festival.
The Angoon pair’s respective documentaries —“Healing Through Time” and “The Canoe That Saved Angoon” — share different perspectives of the U.S. Navy’s 1882 bombardment of Angoon. After over 140 years of silence, the U.S. Navy last October apologized to the community for the attack.
Acemah admits the work can be difficult, which is why they offer regular workshops and classes for teachers.
“We continuously offer teacher professional development so there’s always space for more teachers to get engaged,” Acemah said. “Doing this work with students is very deep, very involved, takes a lot of time; we can’t do all that so we rely on our partnerships with teachers.”
Akiak School’s Alberta Demantle and Cindy Strotman are two such teachers who have taken up the opportunity. The two recently led an afterschool program on filmmaking sponsored by See Stories.
Strotman, a former journalist, said the students got hooked as soon as they saw their work on screen.
“That’s where you really start to see like their whole face change and they just dive into it,” Strotman said. “And then they’re thinking, ‘Oh, I have better pictures’, or, ‘I have better footage’, or, ‘We could talk to my uppy about this too!’”
This story has been updated with additional information.
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