In her book, The Rise (2014), Dr. Sarah Lewis writes about “aesthetic force,” the power art has to change how we see ourselves, the world, and one another. “An encounter with pictures that moves us, those in the world and the ones it created in the mind, has a double-barreled power to convey humanity as it is, and, through the power of the imagination, to ignite an inner vision of life as it could be” (p. 90).
The Stories Project film invites audiences into the lived experiences of a super-diverse (Vertovec, 2007; 2019) group of young adults who served as mentors for refugee-background youth in a summer day camp in 2019. My co-producer, Leo Samuels Vosburgh, and I will screen the film at the 2022 CAMRA: Screening Scholarship Media Festival on the theme of pause. On multiple levels, this project reflects the value of pausing—pausing to listen to one another’s personal narratives, pausing long enough to put our assumptions about people on hold and critically investigate where those assumptions come from, pausing to deeply recognize our shared humanity with people whose cultures and languages are different from ours. The summer day camp, the film’s context, is itself a “pause” for the youth. Unlike their public schools, it’s a place where being an (im)migrant or former refugee is the norm; a space where everyone is learning English as an additional language; a community where everyone has crossed multiple borders to arrive here. Within this place of “pause,” the youth explore their community and who they are in relationship to it. Such exploration fosters both the mentors’ and youth’s creation of meaningful connections across cultural and linguistic differences. Such out-of-school, community-based educational opportunities hold great promise as a way to cultivate interculturality (Dervin, 2016) and relish in the transformative, healing power of simply sharing stories from our lives, listening, and being heard.