7:08 min
Youth Documentary
Kiri Davis, Director,
Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, Producer
ABOUT THE FILM
More About A Girl Like Me from Director Kiri Davis
For my high-school literature class I was constructing an anthology with a wide range of different stories
that I believed reflected the black girl’s experience.
For the different chapters, I conducted
interviews with a variety of black girls
in my high school, and a number of issues
surfaced concerning the standards of
beauty imposed on today’s black girls
and how this affects their self-image.
I thought this topic would make an interesting
film and so when I was accepted into the Reel Works Teen Filmmaking program, I set out to explore these issues.
I also decided to would reconduct the “doll test” initially conducted by Dr. Kenneth Clark,
which was used in the historic desegregation case,
Brown vs. Board of Education. I thought that by
including this experiment in my film, I would
shed new light on how society affects black
children today and how little has actually changed.
With help from my mentor, Shola Lynch,
and thanks to the honesty and openness of
the girls I interviewed, I was able to
complete my first documentary in the fall
of 2005. I learned that giving the girls an
opportunity to talk about these issues and
their experiences helped us all to look deeper
and examine the many things in society that
affect us and shape who we are.
