Paper Clips -- Opens this week at a theatre right near me.

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Film captures a true learning experience
By Rebecca Ostriker | December 12, 2004 -- Boston Globe

Linda Hooper, the principal of Whitwell Middle School, is a straight shooter. The white-haired, steely-blue-eyed educator has lived all her life in Whitwell, Tenn., a former mining community tucked in the Appalachians with a population of 1,600 -- almost entirely white and Protestant.

"We have wonderful children," Hooper says in the new documentary "Paper Clips," which opens Friday at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. "They're respectful, they're thoughtful, they're caring. But they're pretty much homogeneous. . . . We're all alike. And when we come up to someone who is not like us, we don't have a clue."
That homogeneity is one reason the school began a Holocaust project in 1998, using the lessons of World War II to try to teach the kids about prejudice, diversity, and tolerance. The idea of collecting paper clips came up when students had trouble envisioning 6 million, the number of Jews who were killed. When they learned during the war many Norwegians wore paper clips on their lapels as a symbol of resistance to the Nazis, they launched a project to collect 6 million paper clips. The film depicts the events that ensued, which transformed the town and reached around the globe.
"It was really important to me to make sure people understood the abstract concept that each paper clip really did represent somebody who died," says Julia Dixon Eddy, the editor of "Paper Clips," by phone from her home in Framingham. Eddy worked with directors Joe Fab and Elliot Berlin on the Miramax film to pare down more than 100 hours of footage, including scenes in which four Holocaust survivors visit Whitwell and tell their stories, and a confession by assistant principal David Smith that he grew up repeating the kind of racial slurs his father made, but now he's determined to provide a better example for his own two boys.
Near the end, when millions of collected clips are poured into barrels for a memorial, the slow-motion tumbling recalls -- startlingly -- black-and-white concentration-camp newsreels of bulldozers shoveling corpses into mass graves. "To actually see the individual paper clips falling," Eddy says, "I think really brought it home."
For information on screenings, visit www.coolidge.org.

http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2004/12/12/film_captures_a_true_learning_experience/ (Open in New Window)

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Topic - Paper Clips -- Opens this week at a theatre right near me. - clarkjohnsen 10:31:01 12/12/04 (1)

Re: Paper Clips -- Opens this week at a theatre right near me. - EBerlin 20:05:41 12/12/04 (0)

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