Film program shows ‘cycle breakers’
OnMonday evening, Azalee Irving’s short documentary will be streamed by the Gene Siskel Film Center’s BlackHarvest Film Festival. Thatwould be an exciting honor for anyone. For Irving, it runs deeper than excitement.
Irving is 17, the youngest of seven siblings, and lives in a twoflat in Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood with her mother, her sister, her niece and the star of her three-minute film— her 4-year-old nephew, Ja’King Jones.
“Being an African American female on the South Side of Chicago, I see a lot of violence, a lot of poverty,” she said when I called her the other day. “Living in the neighborhood with negatives can make you give up on what makes you positive.”
Irving is blunt about her long struggle to see the positive. As a child, she spent time in foster care. She took mood medications before discovering that therapy was more helpful.
“I started flunking in school,” she said, recalling a time not long ago. “My behavior got bad. I just didn’t have anything that I sawto strive for. I lost interest formy creative spark. DePaul’s program really opened that door back up to me.”
She’s talking about the DePaul/ CHADocumentary Film Program for Girls, a collaboration between DePaulUniversity’s School of Cinematic Arts and the ChicagoHousing Authority. The program is built on two central ideas. One is the need to expand the stories that get told— about Chicago and beyond— by cultivating a wider range of storytellers. The other is the need to expand the vision and experiences of youngwomen living in CHA-subsidized housing.
Liliane Calfee, who runs the program, calls these youngwomen “cycle breakers.”
“They’re the ones going to raise the next generation,” she says. By encouraging the girls to make good choices, like pursuing education, she adds, you make change in a single generation.
The program has been around since 2016, but it’s different during the pandemic of 2020. Instead of meeting in person during the six-week filmmaking period this summer, the 15 girls convened on Zoom. In the first half of the program, using Apple iPad Pros on loan fromthe city’s Department of Family& Support Services, each girl made a three-minute film, usually involving life at home.
“My individual projectwas inspired by me trying to step out of the box,” Irving said. “Instead of having a film about bullying or racism— the classics— itwas, what can I showothers that I haven’t seen before?”
Her answer: her love for Ja’King.
“Iwanted to showeverybody else howmuchmy nephew means to me,” she said, “and show others what their younger relatives can mean to them.”
She recorded Ja’King dancing in the living room, laughing, flexing his bicep, lining up toy trucks on the front stoop. In her voice-over, she talked about helping make sure hewaswell-dressed and, above all, spared some of the “tough things” she’d been through.
“I got discouraged a couple of
times,” she said, recalling the film process, “but the mentors pushed me. I’m glad that I got pushed to trymy best.”
She gave her film a title: “Little Hands, BigHelp.”
Her endurance paid off. One reward came when her film, along with others fromthe program, was selected to appear in an Apple showcase for young people. One Apple executive said that “LittleHands, BigHelp” brought her to tears.
In the second half of the DePaul/CHA program, all the girlsworked in teams. With pandemic precautions, they ventured into the widerworld to tell bigger stories, like the lack of translators in hospitals.
Irvingworked on a project proposed by teammate Deonna West: that social media feeds materialism. ItwasWest’s second year in the program, and she loved it despite the pandemic limitations.
“I like that itwas an all girls thing,” saidWest, who’s 17. “Itwas just so nice to have a group of girls that relate to you. All of uswere being very nice to each other. Therewas no hate.”
And in August, when thework was done, the girls and their faculty mentors gathered— again, with precautions— for a graduation ceremony in Ping TomMemorial Park in Chinatown. The world looked bigger and brighter to them than it had a fewweeks earlier, including for Irving, who came to the celebration with a bandage on her belly.
She’d been stabbed in her neighborhood while trying to protect some younger kids froma guy she later learned lives in Waukegan. Shewas grateful he didn’t hit any organs and that no one else got hurt. Shewas determined to come and be part of her new community.
Starting at 6 p.m. Monday, Irving’s film and several others by her new friends will be streamed as part of the BlackHarvest Film Festival.
She’s sad that because she’ll be on her first day of training to work at aUPSwarehouse over the holidays shewon’t be able to watch. But her family will, and they’ll be proud.
“That’s me!” Ja’King said when he sawhimself on film.
“Everybody loves you, dude,” she told him, and she knew that helping him to knowhewas loved was the biggest reward of all.