Chain Camera

Ten cameras were given for one week in 1999 to 10 students at a Los Angeles area high school of 4,192 students of 41 ethnic backgrounds. The cameras were then passed along to other students throughout the year. The films of 16 of these students were then edited into this candid, mosaic documentation of contemporary urban experience. We meet gays, straights, virgins, a musician, a chronic runaway with bulimia, an angry co-dependent sibling of an alcoholic mother, a beefy teen who has never had a girlfriend and other teens as talk careens from race relations to politics to sex and drugs. Director Kirby Dick (Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Super Masochist) continues his love affair of provocative subject matter by letting kids bare their lives without limitations and then editing them into 4- to 6-minute portraits.