 "Photo: courtesy of Gabriel Dawe")
 "Photo: courtesy of Mona Kasra")
A graduate creativity seminar and a string of tragedies that made headlines inspired a group of students to reach out to young adults contemplating suicide.
Humanities doctoral student Luis Midence and colleagues created the movie "Uncertain" for a seminar with Arts & Humanities professor Greg Metz, who directed students to use art to change the world for the better. The movie, which took six graduate students a day and a half to film and three months to produce, premiered Nov. 20 on the Web.
Midence's six-minute video depicts a troubled young boy's struggle to live after a potentially fatal decision. The 11-year-old finds himself in the back of a car being driven to an empty field. As he starts to remember what happened, he realizes he might be dying because of an overdose of pills he took to end his life. Halfway through the process he decides that he doesn't want to die.
"What happens afterwards, well, it's up to the people to watch," Midence said. "He's not dead, but he's in limbo, and we follow him until he realizes the consequences of his actions."
Midence said he was inspired to help adolescents in April 2009 in response to three suicides occurring within weeks of each other.
"Unfortunately for those kids, they were being called gay and nobody was doing anything about it, and they just decided to take their own lives," he said. "The way I interpreted all this information was that they would rather take their own lives as opposed to being gay."
When the suicides failed to produce follow-up efforts to reduce school bullying, Midence decided he wanted to do something about it.
"All of the suicides were linked to school bullying," Midence said. "At 11, when you don't have the critical skills to analyze anything, words can become something very frightening, especially if you don't know how to talk about it.
Midence began writing a script, but lost momentum until he enrolled in Metz's graduate seminar, where the film became a group effort.
"I was delighted to help him with some of the camera work as soon as he talked to me about the subject matter," said aesthetic studies doctoral student Mona Kasra, videographer. "I think raising awareness for such important and often neglected issues is extremely important and vital."
Since there are many reasons for bullying, the video was created to have a sense of ambiguity, so it could have meaning for young adults with a variety of problems.
"One of the reasons it's titled 'Uncertain' is because it's very ambiguous and nothing is clarified. For example, one of the lines is, 'What if the things they call me are true?' He never says what the things are," Midence said.
Once Midence realized that he was going to pursue this project, he decided to contact national organizations that deal with suicide, including the Trevor Project, The Teen Line and the National Suicide Hotline.
"All these organizations were very excited about the project, and they decided to give us their research," Midence said. "We got really good feedback and resources from them."
Along with the video on the students' Web site, there is also a forum where visitors can share stories about loss, suicide, school life or other concerns.
"It's about the fear of not knowing how to talk about something, then becoming isolated and then ending up making a really bad decision with your life," Midence said. "We want to reignite the conversation, and create more conversation and get more people involved: parents, educators, teenagers, not just authorities, because it affects us all."
The graduate students' video will be screened to an Introduction to the Humanities class in December, and then distributed through UTD organizations and the School of Behavioral Sciences.
For additional information, or to view the video, visit www.uncertainthemovie.info.
