This educational film (full title: We Did It Together. So Why Do I Feel So Alone?) grew out of a peer
education project called Teentalk, which was designed to offer secondary
school pupils an insight into the wide and varied issues that can face teenage
parents. With support from the Arts Council, the Northern Rock Foundation,
Durham County Council and Easington NHS Primary Care Trust, four of the young
mothers involved in the project worked with Amber to produce a video that
reflected the realities of their lives.
In sympathy with the aims of the project and
its intended audience, the film is formally very simple. Combining direct
address to camera by the participants with interview footage, observational
sequences, and still photographs, it allows the young parents to communicate
with their audience in a relatively unmediated way. In its content, the film
does not shy away from some of the harsh realities of teenage parenthood,
whether they are emotional, practical or financial. But it is far from
unremittingly bleak - the women all speak of the joys of being a mother as well
as the hardships.
This is a carefully constructed film that
admirably fulfils its objectives as a vehicle for awareness and discussion. It
avoids overt editorialising, allowing the participants to speak for themselves
and expressing a range of views, issues and opinions with which the audience can
engage in their own way. Together with its supporting educational materials, the
film provides secondary school teachers seeking to address issues of teenage
sexuality and parenthood with their students with an excellent enabling tool. Martin Hunt
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