Allan Appel Photo
Chelsea Martin at Tuesday night’s event, & in film (background).
At 16, Chelsea Martin has already lost people she cares about to violence. She has found a positive way to deal with that.
The high student has signed on with Youth Rights Media and helped put together a new video about the criminal justice.
Adina McCray and Del Valle before some of the questions that help the kids structure their documentaries.
The video was screened to a reunion crowd of two dozen people who attended the organization’s tenth birthday celebration Tuesday night at YRM’s office and studios on Willow Street in New Haven.
YRM began ten years ago when a Yale undergrad and two Yale law students teamed up to teach kids about their rights and responsibilities in encounters with police.
A dozen films by young documentarians later, YRM’s latest documentary goes back to the future, as teens like Chelsea Martin and her good friend Adina McCray were part of the team making another movie on law enforcement. In this one too cops and kids share their often differing perspectives of each other.
Click here on YRM’s YouTube site to view the group’s past work. (No web links or excerpts of the new video were available.)
The as-yet-unnamed new documentary is not quite finished, said Adina McCray who got her video start in church, specifically at the Mt. Zion Seventh Day Adventist Church in Hamden. At the tender age of 12 she pitched in orchestrating the video and running monitors showing the scripture, video, and accompanying audio, and song equipment. She still supervises the crew there.
Adina wants to do this kind of work when she grows up. “This is definitely a job, but one I love,” she said.
These two best friends, who have known each other since they were 11, are among about 22 kids studying documentary film-making or music production in sessions held on Monday, Thursday and Friday nights.
Last summer both girls also worked on “Unspoken,” a YRM media film that addresses gun violence and the stereotyping of teenagers. Chelsea said part of her motivation to work on that one was that she had three friends or acquaintances who have been killed in New Haven gun violence.
Click here to see a trailer from “Unspoken.”
Chelsea and Regina Martin.
“One of the reasons she’s so driven to be part of YRM [is] youth need a place and a voice,” added her mom, Regina Martin. She said her daughter believes that if her murdered friends “had been part of something like this, they wouldn’t have lost their lives.”
Chelsea said she hopes the new film will be shown in the city’s high schools.
The kids themselves will brainstorm the subject for the new documentary they will commence in January. Problems of teen unemployment and perhaps inadequate housing for young people are two suggestions that Chelsea said she will make to YRM’s executive director, Janis Astor Del Valle.
Adina endorsed that idea. “Some kids need to make money to help support their family and no one is hiring a 16-year old even for a basic entry level job,” she said.
The classes, along with stipends if necessary, are free and open to city teens on a first-come basis, said Del Valle. Contact YRM here or call: 776‑4034. The group is currently registering participants for the upcoming session, which begins Jan. 7.
This young lady's account of the police not showing up to a report of a person shot after 40 minutes, and then only after he was described as white, is obviously untrue and unfounded. If there was any substance to this story there would have been 911 tapes and transcripts included in this article. Articles like this only add to the misperception of police and widens the social disconnect between the police and the black community. Maybe this young lady's perception of time is warped. Could she have been referring to seconds and not minutes? I don't know. There are ignorant people out there that believe everything they read. This article only serves one purpose and that purpose is to sensationalized a story to captivate naive readers (particularly black youth) that believe something like this is even possible.