“Bully Free World”

There is a new documentary Bully, written by Lee Hirsch and Cynthia Lowen, directed by Hirsch and Alicia Dwyer. It opens in select theaters in NY and LA this weekend. Here is the trailer:

Here are some production notes on the movie:

This year, over 13 million American kids will be bullied at school, online, on the bus, at home, through their cell phones and on the streets of their towns, making it the most common form of violence young people in this country experience. BULLY is the first feature documentary film to show how we’ve all been affected by bullying, whether we’ve been victims, perpetrators or stood silent witness. The world we inhabit as adults begins on the playground. BULLY opens on the first day of school. For the more than 13 million kids who’ll be bullied this year in the United States, it’s a day filled with more anxiety and foreboding than excitement. As the sun rises and school busses across the country overflow with backpacks, brass instruments and the rambunctious sounds of raging hormones, this is a ride into the unknown. For a lot of kids, the only thing that’s certain is that this year, like every other, bullying will be a big part of whatever meets them at their school’s front doors. Every school in the U.S. is grappling with bullying-each day more than 160,000 kids across the country are absent because they’re afraid of being bullied-but for many districts it’s just one more problem that gets swept under the rug. BULLY is a character-driven film. At its heart are those with the most at stake and whose stories each represent a different facet of this crisis. From the first day of school through the last, BULLY will intimately explore the lives of a few of the many courageous people bullying will touch this year.

After watching the trailer, I started thinking about movies that feature bullying and I came up with a long list including Big Bully, Back to the Future, Mean Girls, The Karate Kid, Three O’Clock High, My Bodyguard. In fictional movies, the traditional story arc is about a Protagonist finding the courage and inner strength to take on the bully and put him/her in their place.

But that’s fiction. What about real life?

Research shows that children with learning disabilities and other special needs are at higher risk — they’re more than twice as likely to be bullied as other kids.

Think about that: Kids with learning disabilities and special needs the victims of verbal and physical abuse by their peers.

I know there are multiple layers to this subject, but at its heart bullying is about a person treating another person as an object, an It. What a documentary like Bully does is humanize the victims… by telling their stories, transforming those victims from an It into a You, from an anonymous face to a distinct individual, a person equally deserving of love and acceptance, and to be free from the fear of abuse.

Is it possible to create a bully free world? I don’t know. But I do know this: As writers, we have the power to tell stories that can change perceptions, and remind us we are all children of God.

The Bully IMDB website here.

To support the effort to create a Bully Free World, go here.

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