Film Enrichment; Freedom Writers.

 In film enrichment we watched ‘                                         

Freedom Writers’ (2007) starring..

• Hilary Swank
• directed by Richard LaGravenese

• Freedom writers is a intresting and captivating American Drama film, Freedom Writers is based on a group of teenagers who attend a hign school is a deprived area of the United States which is crippled by poverty. Freedom Writers is a movie based in Long Beach Miami. There are many different people from different social and ethnic groups involved in the movie, there is a group of Cambodians, a group of Hispantic's, one white student who makes himself an outcast and feels threatened by his peers, and a black student who is bullied for his skin colour and traits. The students feel that education is pointless and that they cannot do anything to better themselves in life, the life of crime, poverty and living below the bread line is all they have. However when they are assigned a new teacher Mrs Gruwell (Hilary Swank) they take a warming to her and start taking pride and enthusiam is there education. Mrs Gruwell encourages them to keep a diary of all there feelings and past experiences.

• Some of the main themes present in the movie are violence, weapons, povery, family loyalty, racism and social class.
• I really liked the character ‘Mrs Gruwell' because she had a very positive influence on her class and played a very active role within the movie.
• My favorite scene in the film was the scene where the woman who harboured Anne Frank and her family came to visit the school and gave a speech to the teenagers because it showed us that even children from such deprived backgrounds still have respect for true heros. 
• I enjoyed this film because it was very relatable, even though the conventions were typical of a drama movie 'Freedom Writers' had an interesting twist to normal drama movies. I liked the way in the end no one in the class was seen as an outcast, people from every ethnic background were united as a sort of family unit.
   

Conventions	Scene example from film Freedom Writers	Scene example from other films that are similar
Poverty	Poverty is displayed in the houses in which the students live.	Adulthood - the main characters live in a run down deprived area of west London.
Racism and Sterotypes	The scene where the young black boy is being bullied by his classmates for his features.	Crash - The young black man is shoot by the police officer in a case of miss thinking. The officer was thinking in a sterotypical manner and assuming the black man was harbouring a weapon.
Family Loyalty	Ava's is told throughout the movie to 'protect her own no matter what'	Flight Plan - the mother was determined not to give up the fight to find her lost daughter on board an aircraft. She was prepared to disrupt and put in danger the lives of everyone else on board the plane on her mission to find her child.
Violence	The scene in which the man is killed in a drive by in front of the young child.	4.3.2.1 - people were using violent measures such as threatening the young girl with dangerous firearms in a bid to get hold of the valuable diamonds she had accidently come into account of.