REEL LIFE A deeper look at complex stories BY TE-PING CHEN

As a middle-aged white woman, Michelle LeBrun was scared when she started teaching documentary making to gang-affiliated youth in Los Angeles in 2003. But when she became an artist-in-residence at AS220’s Broad Street Studio last year and began training students to document the lives of youth incarcerated at the Rhode Island Training School, a juvenile facility under the state Department of Children, Youth and Families, she knew she could do the job.

"They come off so tough," LeBrun says of the youth she works with, "but at the same time, they’re just kids, with really fragile egos."

The resulting Harken Productions documentary, Life in Our Eyes, was screened in August at community forums throughout Rhode Island, with support from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities. After the screenings, audiences were given the chance to directly ask questions to students involved in the production.

More than 70 percent of the youth detained at the training school are of color, and more than 90 percent are male — a population that society dehumanizes, LeBrun contends, and casts as violent "super predators."

AS220 artistic director Bert Crenca agrees, citing a hyper-sensationalized media that romanticizes gangs and rappers like 50 Cent. "We’re a bunch of voyeurs and we eat it up," he says. "Some kid gets killed, and we watch it like a damn soap opera."

In Life in Our Eyes, the camera glides past the yellow doors and austere metal walls of the training school to focus on the faces of five youth who recount their experiences selling heroin, robbing women, and facing gang violence with frank sobriety.

"I didn’t want people to look at my story and glamorize it," says 16-year-old Stephanie Robbins, who left the training school in July. Accordingly, while the youth share sensational stories, the camera doesn’t stop there. Joaquin Rosario, 17, traces his journey from the machete-wielding gangs of Puerto Rico to the violent streets of Rhode Island; later, he is filmed poring over a copy of Chicken Soul for the Baseball Fan’s Soul. Eighteen-year-old Khyree Brown describes his experience selling his mother’s crack at age nine; he also shares his passion for songwriting and his dream of becoming an R&B singer.

LeBrun calls the documentary-making process "incredibly esteem-building, especially for kids that otherwise get so little respect at home and in the judiciary system." Allowing youth to tell their complex narratives, she argues, is "a real validation of who they are and what they know."

For Robbins, the documentary was all about reaching out to others. "If my story can help at least one person understand my reality," she says, "that’s all I wanted."

Asked about his experience, Lucas McGill, a 17-year-old at the Broad Street Studio, sounds unfazed. "At the premieres, people asked us all these questions, but it wasn’t some introspective, creative thing we were doing," he says, adding that he was more interested in using a camera and having fun with it.

"Some of them called us inspirational," McGill adds. "I thought that was pretty weird. I don’t think I’m that inspirational."