HARTFORD, Conn. — Picture this: Your parents sent you to tennis camp and the head instructor has a rigid view of what it means to be a boy or a girl. So you and your fellow campers decided to change that.
This is the premise of the short film’Bay Creek Tennis Camp‘ which will be shown at the next Out Film CT.
The film, from writer-director Michele Meek, was filmed last summer.
“I really wanted to give voice to young people, because a lot of the academic research I’ve done has focused on youth,” Meek said. “And I’m interested in presenting their perspective as much as possible. And there are many young people who think there might be better ways to divide children’s sports besides gender.”
Meek, who is an assistant professor in the communications studies department at Bridgewater State University, said she believes the problem often plays out in smaller, more personal stages.
“It’s not just children who don’t identify, as they were assigned at birth, there are other children as well,” she said. “I mean, these are kids who are boys who would like to not participate in hockey or, you know, play with aggressive lacrosse rules, and they’re kind of eliminated because they don’t have a place to play.
She added: “I was very interested in what young people had to say on the subject, what a coach could say, what kids could say to each other.”
Meek financed the short film with a grant from the Rhode Island Council of the Arts, private donations for the film and a university scholarship.
“I also partially financed it,” Meek said. “Rhode Island Production Company, Animus Studiosjoined as a partner and provided the equipment, including the RED camera, as well as some of the crew.
Meek hopes that in the future, people will be more accepting of change, even for things they don’t easily understand.
“I think as adults who grew up in a certain context with certain messages, you know, we don’t always understand, but we also know that when we were young, we had different ways of seeing the world than those of the adults around us,” she said. “And we were going to remake our world according to our vision.”
Bay Creek Tennis Camp will be presented on Saturday, October 14 at 3:00 p.m. at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford. It will also be available to stream online from October 6 to 23. For more information, visit Excluding Film CT .
For festival highlights, click here
Doug Stewart is a senior digital content producer at FOX61 News. He can be reached at [email protected].
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