Red Carpet for RunDSM at Documentary Premiere
The student-poets that put Movement 515 in motion are typically seen doing their thing live. The finished products they perform are polished and ripe. But Thursday night was different. This time they were the stars of a documentary film, RunDSM: The Doc, that’s been in the works for the last year and a half and premiered at the Fleur Cinema.
Produced by local filmmaker Nick Strickland, the full-length feature included plenty of footage from the slams and share-the-mic public events M515 is known for but also offered behind-the-scenes glimpses of where the raw inspiration for the powerful poetry comes from and who the poets were before they were poets.
There was an electric pre-premiere buzz in the theater lobby as teens about to see themselves up on the big screen hugged and posed for photos with their proud families.
Strickland parlayed connections with Fleur Cinema forged through his participation in the annual 48-Hour Film Festival that’s hosted there into Thursday’s screening event and the growing RunDSM/M515 community turned out to fill the house.
The film chronicles the contagion that has spread from two teachers and a lone student in an afterschool workshop at Harding Middle School and infected hundreds of teens districtwide with incurable and unconquerable hopes and dreams.
“I never thought when we came to Des Moines Public Schools that this would be my job,” says program co-founder/teacher Kristopher Rollins in the film. Maybe calling is the better word.
With a runtime of an hour and fifty minutes, RunDSM: The Doc emerged from the cutting room much longer than was envisioned when the project began.
“We were thinking maybe 45 minutes,” said Rollins beforehand. “But there’s just so much material and so many layers to the personal stories that even after Nick edited all of his raw footage this is what remained.”
Layers indeed. From the classroom where it launched at Harding, RunDSM led to M515 with chapters now at all five of the DMPS home high schools and a growing number of half-pint chapters sprouting in elementary schools. There is a street art branch. There are the annual Teen Summit and Summer Famfest events. There is the Urban Leadership curriculum at Central Campus, developed and taught by Rollins and Lang, that doesn’t have room for all of the students clamoring to enroll. And there is the growing reputation around the country of the teams the district is sending every summer to compete in the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Festival. That’s led to an invitation for two of the poets featured in the film, North senior Julio Delgadillo and East senior Elhondra Brazzle, to perform and compete this weekend in a spoken-word event at the National Book Festival in Washington D.C.
Speaking of art festivals, Strickland and the teachers who are co-parents of the program, Rollins and Emily Lang, are exploring options for taking RunDSM: The Doc on the film festival circuit. Pending the tour you can check out the film in its entirety here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbKDzKyFtrk
When the credits rolled and the lights came up the crowd responded with a long, loud outburst of “energetic reciprocity” (see the film). But the story was not over. If the film leaves you wanting more, rest assured there is plenty more to come.
