New to DVD/VOD this week: MENTOR
Alix Lambert’s smalltown bullying exposé debuted at Newport Beach in the Spring. It has also screened at Frameline, Austin, Woodstock, and Chagrin.
Mentor OH has been recognized as one of the best places to live in America, but this designation ignores a rash of teen suicides that have taken place – suicides that seem linked to bullying and homophobia. Lambert’s investigation focuses on two of the victims, Eric and Sladjana, as represented by their parents, who reveal the treatment their children faced in the hallways of Mentor High School. Eric’s is a sadly familiar and simple story: He internalized the homophobic slurs and taunts of worthlessness levied against him on a daily basis, while also suffering physical violence, and kept his torment from his parents until he one day shot himself. Sladjana suffered similar abuse, compounded by her family’s Croatian immigrant background and their corresponding ethnic, cultural, and language differences – but in contrast with Eric’s family, hers were all too aware of what she was going through, and vocal, persistent advocates for their daughter. They actively sought solutions to the bullying, seeking institutional changes at the high school, getting counseling for Sladjana, and expressing their concerns that she might harm herself if she didn’t get relief from the ill treatment – and there pleas fell on deaf ears as their daughter eventually hanged herself. Sladjana’s experience is much more complex, and for that reason takes on a greater weight here – which consequently leads to Eric’s story getting somewhat lost by the time the film wraps up. Lambert spends a bit too much screen time painstakingly laying out Sladjana’s parents’ detailed evidence – email messages with school administrators, records of Sladjana’s visits to the school nurse, logs from counseling sessions – evidence, noted here, that the school itself went out of its way to quickly dispose of in order to protect itself. The film does have clear impact, particularly in revealing Sladjana’s heartbreaking story and exposing the reprehensible actions of the school administration, but leaves somewhat underdeveloped a larger sense of the underlying aspects of the town’s culture that would allow them to willfully ignore or excuse such behavior that sacrifices young people like Sladjana and Eric in its wake.
what (not) to doc 