SCREW YOUR COURAGE – documentary film (2000)
In Screw Your Courage, young African-Americans who’ve dropped out of high school try to get their lives back on track with an unusual project for their impoverished Oakland, CA neighborhood. After spending their days doing hard labor at minimum wage, they transform into bloody-handed kings and queens with a performance of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
DVCAM, length: 26 min., 2000, USA
“If we should fail? – We fail!
But screw your courage to the sticking place
And we’ll not fail.”
Shakespeare: Macbeth Act 1. Sc. 7.
Produced, directed, photographed and edited by
Zsuzsanna Varga
Associate producer
Kelly St. John
Music
Michael Turner
Sound
Matthew Brunwasser, Jessie Deeter, Craig Delaval, Jeff Gove, Lisa Munoz, Sara Needham
Creative advisor
Jon Else
Editorial advisor
Deborah Hoffmann
Technical advisor
Kean Sakata
On-line editor
Karen Everett
Main cast (in order of appearance)
Yusuf Salahuddin, Khalesa Hasan, Willim Boynton, Victoria Evans, Charlie Marenghi
Other participants
T.J. Wedeman, Tressie Ball, Felicia Crump, Matt Gietl, Spencer Wolfe, Audrey Russano, Marcus Williams, Latoya Stroughter, Isaac Jabbar, Grady Jackson, Apollo DeLove, Maggie Richardson, Kisha Davidson, Monique Perry, Anthony Tatem
Special thanks to
Joan Bieder, William Drummond, Chris Jenkins, Kate Kline May, Bence Nanay, Linda Schacht
East Bay Conservation Corps: Jonathan Albert
SF Shakespeare Festival: Toby Leavitt, Charles McCue
Produced at the University of California at Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism
Copyright © 2000 Zsuzsanna Varga
SYNOPSIS
In Screw Your Courage, young African-Americans who’ve dropped out of high school try to get their lives back on track with an unusual project for their impoverished Oakland, CA neighborhood. After spending their days doing hard labor at minimum wage, they transform into bloody-handed kings and queens with a performance of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
The San Francisco Shakespeare Festival’s Midnight Shakespeare program teaches inner-city youth communication, performance, discipline, and teamwork through Shakespeare. This ten-week program tries to respond to the problems of violence and gang-related issues. It culminates with a performance of Shakespearean scenes and monologues, with a set and props built by the participants during the course. Upon completing the program they are given a $100 stipend.
Screw Your Courage follows the rehearsal process from two young persons’ point of view. Yusuf and Khalesa are both 21 years old. Yusuf (Macbeth) used to be a drug dealer but turned his life around for a safer future. Khalesa (Lady Macbeth) has two children from two different fathers and she is trying to fulfill her dream to become a clothes designer. Both of them dropped out of high school, but now they continue studying for their GED at the East Bay Conservation Corps.
The first act shows the newcomers’ initiation into Shakespeare’s world, the participants’ first meeting with their teachers and each other.
The second act builds up the conflict in Yusuf’s and Khalesa’s life, as well as in the play. The actors face the necessity of relying on each other and trusting each other, which is anything but easy when attendance at rehearsals is irregular and hardly anyone makes the effort to memorize his lines.
In the third act everything is still open and rather chaotic. The disaster seems to be around the corner. The actors – together with the viewers – have no clue whether the performance will happen at all. It’s only two weeks away, but some of the actors are still fighting with their texts. The Elizabethan English challenges their tongues – the film shows the hard tries and failures, but also the moments when they catch the rhythm and the flow of the words. The participants’ enthusiasm is fluctuating and the rehearsal process takes an unexpected turn.
In the last act things are getting back into order, but even a few days before the performance the outcome is dubious…
The film’s main characters find the things in their lives reflect the Shakespearean conflicts. Power fights, betrayal, vanity, violence, assassination, revenge, broken families, superstition and remorse are issues that establish Macbeth’s plot and characterize today’s life, too. “I’ll go back no more, I am afraid to think of what I have done,” says Macbeth together with Yusuf, who had changed his life for good and has no desire to return to his past.
“War-story” (Challenges during filmmaking)
Riding the emotional roller-coaster with Khalesa…
Learning that Yusuf is going to become a father…
Muttering the tongue-twisting Elizabethan lines with them during the final performance…
Fighting for Yusuf’s words in the editing room to make his story concise, shaving words and building sound bites without altering the meaning, cheering about gaining fractures of a second….
Coming from Hungary, fearing the possibility of being rejected by a group of hard-life African-American teenagers, finding them extremely accepting, friendly and open to my absolutely different background….
I enjoyed and coped with the challenge of diversity. Producing, shooting and editing Screw Your Courage introduced me to different aspects of life in America, appealing and engaging personalities among grinding and rough circumstances.
AWARDS
Best Documentary Short Prize – The 25th Atlanta Film and Video Festival 2001
Best Short Doc Award – 2002 DocSide Documentary Film Festival, San Antonio, TX
Andrew A. Stern award for the most promising television documentary at the Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley in May 2000
Honorable Mention – Carolina Film and Video Festival 2001
EVENTS
KTOP-TV (Oakland, CA government access cable channel) – December 16th 2000
KQED (San Francisco Bay Area PBS affiliate) – February 18th 2001 (as part of the series “Independent View”.)
Carolina Film and Video Festival (Greensboro, NC) – March 14 – 17 2001
Firstglance4 Philadelphia – March 26 – 30 2001
Fairfax Documentary Film Festival (Fairfax, CA) – March 31 2001
Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee – April 4 – 8 2001
John Hopkins Film Festival (Baltimore, MD) – April 12 – 15 2001
Mediawave International Festival of Visual Arts (Győr, Hungary) – April 27 – May 5 2001
Rochester International Film Festival (Rochester, NY) – May 4-7 2001
The 25th Atlanta Film and Video Festival (Atlanta, GA) – June 8-16 2001
New Orleans Film Festival – October 14-18 2001
Nextframe UFVA’s Touring Festival of International Student Film and Video – 2001-2002
Docside 2002 Documentary Film Festival (San Antonio, TX) – March 1-3 2002
Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA) presents Screw Your Courage on April 15th 2001 as part of “Lost and Found: Documentaries from the Graduate School of Journalism”
SCREW YOUR COURAGE – a documentary film by Zsuzsanna Geller-Varga on Vimeo.
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