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Synopsis
Meet Kandice, a precocious, insightful African-American teenager who
participates in METCO, a voluntary school integration program in
Boston. Since kindergarten, Kandice has risen before dawn each day to
catch a bus out to the public schools of Weston, an affluent,
predominantly white suburb. In Far From Home Kandice shares her
conflicted feelings and keen observations about traversing these two
different worlds. Now in her last two years of high school, she takes
us inside her personal triumphs, struggles, and daily negotiations:
serving as the first black class president at her high school; playing
the college admissions game; defying the stereotypes that she feels
from white society; living up to her family's tradition of activism.
Kandice's grandfather, a civil rights activist who was murdered in
1968, helped found the busing program, and her mother was among the
first classes of black students bused to the suburbs in the late 1960s.
Through cinema verité and interviews, Far From Home weaves together
Kandice's current school life with a family history that has been
profoundly shaped by racially integrated educational experiences.
Running Time: 39 minutes
The Making of Far From Home
Filmmaker Rachel Tsutsumi began researching and thinking about this
project in the beginning of 2001. As a former high school student in a
Boston suburb that was part of the METCO program, Rachel realized years
later that she had very little knowledge of the program or
understanding of the experience of the METCO students. Upon discovering
that METCO is the longest-running voluntary school desegregation
program in the country (it began in 1966), and that it is continuously
fighting for state funding to stay afloat, she believed this would make
a good subject for a documentary.
Rachel worked for a year doing preproduction, meeting with school
districts around Boston to gain access, and looking for students to be
subjects in the film. By the summer of 2002, she decided to focus on
only one student, Kandice, and her remarkable family. Rachel began
taping in the fall of 2002 with the generous permission of the Weston
Public Schools. Working alone, she taped Kandice for days and sometimes
weeks at a time—at home very early in the mornings, at school, on the
weekends with her friends, on the school bus, at theater rehearsals, at
the hair salon, immediately following the SAT, at church with her
family. As a one-person camera and sound crew, Rachel was very mobile
and maintained an intimate style of shooting. It became clear to Rachel
early on that the focus of the film would be less about the busing
program, and more about Kandice—telling Kandice's story, from her point
of view, in her own words.
In the end, after two years of taping, Rachel captured 105 hours of
footage. Editing began in June 2004 with the support of the CNN/HBO
grant. The film was completed and aired on CNN in February of 2005.
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