Collegebound

The Graduates is a film that tells the story of Latin American students and some of the struggles that they go through. The editing of the film is very well done. The visuals of the film work well with the story and structure of the film. The visuals do not needlessly illustrate what the voice-overs are stating. The editor of the film revealed that the necessary amount of footage required to make a documentary is about 400 hours of film. It is the editor’s job to find a story within these 400 hours of the students living their daily lives. Sometimes this process is eased by the director giving the editor the best 20 hours of the original 400 hours of film. The problem with this is that it is the best 20 hours of film according to the director. It is possible that the director may have cut out very relevant or powerful scenes.

The struggles that the students undergo range from typical teenage problems to gang violence. Examples of such typical teenage problems are fitting in and teen pregnancy. Although Latin-American students must deal with these situation more often than their Caucasian counterparts, the film should not have only focused on Hispanics. It brings up the idea that Hispanics are less than human. The film is similar to a zoo because the students are followed and studied similarly like animals are studied and followed around at the zoo. If the film focused on various ethnic students including Caucasians, it would send out the idea of equality. Students of different social and financial status could go through similar teenage problems, but this gets left out in the film because it focuses solely on Hispanics.

Aside from the film’s choice to focus on Hispanics, it does accurately illustrate the problems that plague most minorities students today not only Hispanics.