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Documentary About South Side Teens in Germany Premieres Sunday

By Sam Cholke | November 13, 2015 5:55am
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Cam Be

HYDE PARK — A South Sider’s documentary about five South Side high school students getting the chance to go to Germany and live in an artist-run mansion premieres in Chicago on Sunday.

Cameron “Cam Be” Burkett shot the film of the students traveling to see South Sider Theaster Gates and then being let loose in Kassel, Germany, during the dOCUMENTA (13) art festival.

Burkett said he had been hired by the Little Black Pearl in 2012 to document the trip and when he left, like the students, it was his first trip to Europe and he wasn’t expecting to find a story that would turn into his first feature-length documentary.

“Seeing the experiences and how they were talking about it was really interesting,” Burkett said Thursday. “I think they liked how they were treated there.”

He said he slowly came to realize while he was documenting the trip that the five students were having a really profound experience and understanding what it meant to be African-American in a context outside of the United States.

“In Europe, you’re just treated different as an African-American and you realize a lot of Europeans look up to your culture.” Cam Be said. “They felt more judged in the United States and there they felt like they had more possibilities.

The documentary captures the students there during another exchange with the South Side. Theaster Gates was in the midst of “12 Ballads for Huguenot House,” a project where he was taking pieces of his own home at Dorchester Projects and exchanging them with pieces of the mansion. The students catch him during the first day of the project and then are left with the milieu of international students and artists staying in the mansion during the art festival.

“They were interested and they were intrigued — but they were still Americans,” Cam Be said. “We grow up as Americans with this pride and going there they still felt that, still they were way more open than they would be here.”

He said the documentary has screened in France and other countries in Europe already and the audiences there have more been shocked at how rare it is for South Side teens to travel abroad.

The 4 p.m. premiere Sunday at the Black Cinema House, 7200 S. Kimbark Ave., will be more nostalgic than revelatory with much of the sold-out crowd expected to be made up of the students who went on the trip three years ago and their friends and family.

Burkett said he’s hoping to schedule a second showing in Chicago since the first sold out so quickly.

“The Exchange” screens next at the Paris International Film Festival Nov. 27 through Dec. 1.

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