Twentysomethings: Loss, Rehabilitation, and Documentary Filmmaking in South Central LA

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By Jake De Grazia

"When you think about your life, like what’s the one thing that you fear the most?" asks Claudia Gomez.

"Probably to lose my peoples," answers Cris Carter.

"Lose them how?" asks Gomez.

"Get shot, uh, anything to have them stop living," answers Carter

Next to the camera sits Claudia Gomez. She wears tight jeans, Air Jordans, hoop earrings, and long, pink fingernails. She’s twenty years old, and she’s interviewing Cris Carter, one of the students she works with. He’s nineteen, and he got out of prison two weeks ago.

"What’s like the number one thing you think nobody knows about you... That now we’re gonna know," asks Gomez.

"Uh, that, uh, I’m not really, like, I’m not a disrespectful type of dude, like, my insides are like, I ain’t disrespectful none," answers Carter.

"That’s cool. I knew that," said Gomez.
.
"Thank you," said Carter.

Claudia’s studio is a classroom at Free LA High, a charter school many of whose students have spent time in the correctional system. Free LA instructors help them earn their degrees, while teaching them about social justice and community organizing. Claudia’s first year working at the school, she ran the front desk and mentored struggling students. Then she met documentary filmmaker Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, and her responsibilities grew.

"It all started like last summer. Jennifer was like doing interviews on like does prison make you a better person? And I just happened to one day be around," said Gomez.

Claudia had never used a camera before, but she was a natural. And, in January, Jennifer hired Claudia to co-produce a series of short documentaries about the Free LA community for public broadcasting. Claudia works on all aspects of the project: she films, helps edit, organizes shoots. She’s at her best, though, when she’s sitting across from a student or colleague, and the camera is on.

"Like after the interviews, like, I had some of them come up to me and be like man I hadn’t
thought about that question or I hadn’t thought about my life in that way," said Claudia Gomez.

For Claudia, the filmmaking is an opportunity to connect deeper into her community. She grew up in South Central. When she was 12, she watched her sister get shot and killed by an ex-boyfriend. She spent the next five years angry, fighting, on the streets. Then she got pregnant and pulled it together. Now she works with kids like the one she used to be.

"Sometimes I have to step out of my role as a mentor and step into myself and who I am as a person and that’s how I’ll talk to them," said Gomez.

"Have you ever had a family member get killed?" asks Gomez.
"No, well, my friend. Just a friend but..." answers a kid she works with.
"I mean a friend is something," asks Gomez.
"Yeah well two of my friends died in a fire, and one of my friends got shot."
"And do you feel like the person who shot your friend deserves another chance?..." asks Gomez.

"I love it. I love doing like this documentary stuff because when you see these people that
we are interviewing, like you’ll never know how deep their story is by just looking at them.
Like you’ll never know how like, like beautiful they are," said Claudia Gomez.

Beautiful and fragile. Cris Carter, the young man Claudia was talking to at the beginning of this story was murdered about a month after that interview. He was the second Free LA student shot in the head and killed this semester.

"Part of this job is to see people come and go, you know, whether they come and go because they want to or they come and go because they die," said Gomez.

Tears are flowing. But Claudia’s face and voice don’t change. She reaches for a roll of scratchy grey paper towels and tears off a piece.

"His family like you know they have to see that interview. Like he was just so pure and like so honest and so humble and so I’m not rude I’m very polite, and people always think that because I have tattoos on my face I’m this certain way. Like, I'm really glad that we got to interview him and for him to reflect on himself, because after that day he's like, man, you know, I feel good," said Gomez.

"Are you happy?" asks Gomez.

"Yup. Stay happy," said Carter.

"Yeah. That’s cool," said Gomez.

"Thank you," answers Carter.

"You look really serious," said Gomez.

"I do? I am serious," answers Carter.