One high school, one school year, five new Americans. In the feature-length documentary “I Learn America,” five resilient immigrant teenagers come together over a year at the International High School at Lafayette in New York City and struggle to learn about and get comfortable with their new land. The students strive to master English, adapt to families they haven’t seen in years, confront the universal trials of adolescence, and search for a future they can claim as their own. Through these five vibrant young people, their stories and struggles, and their willingness to open their lives and share them with us, we “learn America.” Special guest speakers will include the voices of Los Angeles’s youth involved in “I Learn America.”
Emerging from this MacArthur Foundation funded documentary film, I Learn America (ILA) has become a youth-led, multifaceted, and participatory education project with a mission to use the power of storytelling to foster empathy, urgency, and action around issues affecting migrant youth, as they forge their own path in a new land – I Learn America has a successful 7-year history of providing programming to over 20,000 youth nationally who have filled a digital library with 1000+ migration stories and implemented innovative artistic actions that deepen public explorations and understanding of who they/we are, challenging the very idea of what it means to be “American.”
For 6 years, I Learn America (ILA) has been collaborating with schools in Los Angeles.
Website: www.ilearnamerica.com
Instagram: www.instagram/ilearnamerica
The screening will take place at LA Plaza, Room 406.