Award already ‘in the bag’ for budding filmmakers

Student-produced video garners rave reviews

The plastic shopping bag that floated lazily across the front steps of the Manitoba Legislature was just the sight provincial Liberal leader Jon Gerrard and some students from Cecil Rhodes School are hoping to get rid of.

On Monday, the Cecil Rhodes video club met Gerrard in the Legislature to screen It’s in the Bag, a video made by the students about the environmental risks posed by plastic bags. Later that day, Gerrard introduced a bill attempting to ban the use of single-use shopping bags in Manitoba.

“It’s time to change the way we do things,” said Gerrard, who introduced a similar bill last fall, which was quashed during its second reading.

“If we’re going to use bags, they should be cloth bags, which can be re-used, or they should be biodegradable bags, but not plastic bags.”

That’s an opinion shared by the video club. It’s in the Bag features a plastic bag named Mr. Polymer talking to his therapist about how he feels unwanted after having been a vital part of people’s lives for 30 years.

The video, which features a blend of live action and stop-motion photography, has just won a national award from Panasonic (though the club does not yet know in what category). Two students from the club will travel to Toronto next week to accept the award.

“We’re really excited,” said Jezel Axalan, the video’s director who will be going to accept the award. The Grade 7 student said the idea for doing a video about plastic bags came from the desire to be able to make a real difference.

“We focused on the whole ‘ban the bag’ thing, because we thought it was a really big issue happening in the world, and we thought that we could really stop this, and have an impact,” she said.

According to Andrea Powell, the teacher in charge of the video club, the students originally had a much wider scope but they concluded that narrowing the focus of the video would make the video more persuasive.

“They thought initially they were going to do something on global warming,” said Powell. “They started off with an idea that they would do 20 things that you could do to help with global warming, and then they decided that it might have more impact if they chose one thing, and focused on that.”

Gerrard said the video shows just how much people — particularly young people — are concerned about the environment.

“The Cecil Rhodes kids have done just an outstanding job,” he said. “I think that the passion, the commitment, the interest that they’ve generated shows where kids are today. They know that the environment, and looking after the environment is really important.”