How is a school remembered or imagined through a movie camera?

This private workshop will bring together local Pittsburgh public school teachers, high school students, and activists impacted by the district’s recent wave of school closures. Led by artist and filmmaker Chantal Feitosa-Desouza, the session is for individuals and groups interested in learning how to utilize community-based filmmaking practices to archive the process of a school closure.

The session will begin with Chantal screening her 10-minute documentary Lightning in a Bottle, which retraces the process of Schenley High School’s closure and transformation into luxury apartments. Chantal will share the resources and insights she utilized to make the film, such as:

• Researching and organizing archival materials on Pittsburgh Public Schools
• Identifying a tone and voice for your perspective
• Framing questions for interviews
• Curating and editing many different sources of media into a cohesive narrative

As a group, participants will consider how community members in present-day Pittsburgh can author their own stories using resources at their disposal (from physical memorabilia and local libraries to oral history, local journalism, and the internet). We will move through a series of creative prompts to help us build stories around the objects and memories associated with Pittsburgh public schools.

Good to know in advance

• Participants are asked to bring at least one or two (1–2) personal school archives to share and experiment with in real time. These can be physical or digital, such as a photograph, a yearbook, a sound clip on your phone, an event flyer, a sports jersey, or whatever item holds a memory of your relationship to your school.
• After the workshop, participants will receive a digital toolkit summarizing the resources covered in the session. This guide can be used as a reference as they continue to process the closure of their neighborhood schools and create their own films.
• This workshop acknowledges that we are all experts in our own lived experiences and challenges presented by structural inequality. All participants will have the option to opt in or out of having their own contributions, comments, and resources shared/cited in the toolkit that will be shared post-workshop.
• This workshop will provide light snacks and refreshments

Registration