Described by director Kim S. Snyder as “a coming-of-age story about a bunch of regular teenage kids who live their lives against the backdrop of this horrendous national issue of gun violence,” “Us Kids” takes place in the aftermath of the 2018 Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. The documentary sees Emma González, Samantha Fuentes, Cameron Kasky, and other Parkland survivors banding together to address gun violence and organize the largest youth protest in American history.
Determined to change the national conversation around gun violence, hold politicians accountable, and make March For Our Lives a success, the teenage activists are channeling their grieving process into “doing something,” we’re told.
“Before all of this we were normal-ass kids doing normal-ass things,” Fuentes explains. After experiencing gun violence first-hand, she and others are determined to build a better future. But “Us Kids” makes it clear that the kids are, of course, still grieving and struggling to cope with the trauma they’ve endured. “It’s hard to trust anyone these days, considering a kid I barely fucking know tried to kill me,” Fuentes reveals. She’s far from the only survivor who struggles with fear and anxiety, especially in big crowds.
González can’t help but wonder if she’s “brave” or “hardheaded” and “naive” when it comes to pushing for systemic change — and the cost that comes with this public-facing mission. We see the Parkland teens being accused of being puppets and pawns by their detractors, but having their agency and integrity questioned, as frustrating and insulting as it is, pales in comparison to being on the receiving end of a constant barrage of death threats.
“Us Kids” marks Snyder’s follow-up to 2016’s “Newtown,” a portrait of Newtown, Connecticut, one year after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that left 26 people, including 20 children between six and seven years old, dead.
“It was by happenstance I came to this story; I was pursuing a different project in Florida at the time and ended up in Tallahassee the week that the Parkland shooting happened,” the director told us. “After making ‘Newtown,’ I had been feeling that the nation hadn’t reckoned with the hundreds of thousands of traumatized youth, this generation of kids who are terrified. So when I found myself on the steps of the capital in Tallahassee, and all these kids arrived by the busloads saying a version of this, and I was there with a camera, I realized I had to start filming. It also was a story I could never tell with my prior film, ‘Newtown,’ because in Newtown they were first graders, and we were telling the story of what a town looks like in the wake of tragedy, and about the parents and their enormous loss. ‘Us Kids’ is from the point of view of the kids themselves,” she explained. “It is about their rage and grief.”
Rage and grief are threads that run throughout “Us Kids.” They drive the teens’ herculean effort to change their country, and as inspiring as the activists are, the doc never shies away from the personal toll that rage and grief take on them. What happened at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas galvanized a movement, but it was also a horribly tragic event that has scarred its survivors and informs every facet of their lives. We see González questioning whether she deserves to go to college or if she owes it to the movement to commit herself full-time. Kasky shares that, had he not been a Parkland student, he likely would have gotten involved in politics and advocated for gun control anyway, but “doing it because you want to and doing it because you feel like you have to are very different things.” The doc doesn’t shy away from these tensions, and while it celebrates its titular kids for all they’ve accomplished, it never loses sight of the fact that they were thrust onto the national stage under horrific circumstances because the grownups — and especially elected officials — let them and their deceased peers down so terribly.
“Us Kids” is now in theaters and available on VOD. Find screening info here.
