Kim A. Snyder is back with another documentary about gun violence. She’s following up 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 with “Us Kids,” a look inside the March For Our Lives movement. A trailer has dropped for the project, which follows Parkland shooting survivors Emma González, David Hogg, Samantha Fuentes, and other teenage activists fighting to prevent gun violence in the United States.
“Before all of this we were normal-ass kids doing normal-ass things,” we’re told. After experiencing gun violence first-hand, the teenagers lives were forever changed — and they were determined to build a better future. “We’re seeing a real movement here, not just a moment,” one character emphasizes. The doc follows the next generation of activists as they “pull off the largest youth protest in American history and set out across the country to build an inclusive and unprecedented youth movement that addresses racial justice, a growing public health crisis, and shocks a political system into change,” the film’s synopsis details.
“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,” Snyder 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.”
“Us Kids'” launch is kicking off with a Vote With Us Virtual Rally, a national GOTV campaign with “the focus to educate, motivate, a mobilize young people and communities of color to vote early. The event will take place on Saturday, October 24, at 3 p.m. ET/Noon PT, streaming at www.votewith.us and simulcast across YouTube and more,” a press release details. The doc will be released theatrically via Alamo Drafthouse Virtual Cinema. A special sneak preview of the film will be available to view for free October 24-25 on YouTube: you can register to screen it here.
