With Us Kids, director Kim A. Snyder strips away the apparent glamor of a recent political movement, the better to see the passionate but deeply traumatized individuals at its center. We know what happened on February 14, 2018, when a gunman murdered 17 people (14 students, two faculty members, and one teacher) and injured 17 more at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. We remember that it happened during that raw, particularly emotional period following the mass shootings in Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs, Texas – not that the United States doesn’t have enough mass shootings that one would almost certainly happen in the raw, emotional period following another.
What was slightly different about the aftermath of the Stoneman Douglas school shooting was the nature of the response. Victims and survivors texted, Tweeted and Snapchatted about their experiences, and a group of the survivors took to activism to fight for change. Snyder follows the latter, a collection of faces we almost certainly recognize. X González unintentionally became the face of the movement after their impassioned “We Call B.S.” speech and a six-minute-and-20-seconds “moment” of silence to commemorate the amount of time it took for their friends to die. David Hogg was targeted for being a “crisis actor” by the likes of popular television and online personalities (and at least one future House Representative). Cameron Kasky went off-script during a CNN Town Hall to ask Senator Marco Rubio to stop taking money from the National Rifle Association.
We know how little change has happened. After the filming of this documentary, which takes place over the course of the year following the shooting, there was finally some executive action taken regarding guns and gun control. Those changes didn’t happen under the administration that was in power at the time, of course, so it’s all too little too late. Meanwhile, mass shootings will occur. Innocent people will die. A wrong-headed interpretation of an amendment to the Constitution will always take priority over the lives seemingly sacrificed for that freedom.
The documentary is broadly effective at showing us what activists like González, Hogg and Kasky can accomplish when given a platform – though Kasky just barely holds it together during one encounter with a counter-protester who believes him to be mixed up in political theater, reminding the man that he is currently living in his worst nightmare. He eventually steps away from activist duties, but as tired as González is, they feel simultaneously obligated to do something, passionate about making a difference and entirely unprepared for the publicity of it all.
Even more affecting are the stretches following Sam Fuentes, whose injuries to her legs and face compounded a sense of survivor’s guilt, having been in a group of three shot by that gunman. The other two, her desk mates, were killed, and now she has befriended the younger brother, himself injured in the shooting, of one of those desk mates. Not only is Fuentes revisited to this day by images of the shooting; when it crops up in her dreams, the face of the brother who lived now replaces that of the one who died. These are the lingering, post-traumatic ghosts of the Stoneman Douglas shooting, and we must remind ourselves that two survivors ended their own lives barely a year after narrowly escaping death.
One does get the feeling that Snyder is only scratching the surfaces of these stories. That certainly attests, however, to the fact that these are deep lives, pockmarked by tragedy and being slowly rebuilt through a resilient spirit and a refusal to stand by while nothing is accomplished. Us Kids is a bit scattershot, but it’s an effective and affecting tribute to a movement.
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