Documentary Analysis: Straightlaced

For my documentary analysis, I attended the Minnesota premier of the documentary film, Straightlaced. Below is a preview of the film:

Purpose: The purpose of this film is to discuss “gender” as a social construction that affects everyone, but particularly developing teens. How do society and the media put pressure or relief on people based on their sex and supposed gender? What are teens worried about when it comes to gender? Do they feel safer inside of a box or out of it? How do teens define masculine and feminine? Do they feel there is a gender binary? The film aims to be extremely honest in its discussion of gender by truly allowing the issue and the people it affects to speak freely about it. The film also aims to demonstrate ways in which students feel pressured to conform to a certain “standard” of gender and that they are aware of this pressure and they are willing to talk about it.

Intended Audience: Anyone and everyone. Particularly those who work with young people and people who strongly believe in the gender binary, or those who don't!

Techniques Used: The entire film is composed of interviews with young people—high school students from across the country. There is very little direction and no interaction with the director on screen whatsoever. The technique used here is letting the images and voices speak for themselves. The students seemed to direct the flow of the film and what would be the emphasis. This honesty from them made this seem extremely genuine and open. Rather than a director or other adult speaking or summarizing the issue, the film is only interviews. The students are candid, honest and opinionated. The bias of the film seemed to be more liberal—allowing for a more spectrum-based definition of gender—but it was not particularly blatant, the students had their own opinions and each person was respectfully recognized for their opinion. The film felt extremely realistic—the students sound like others I have known—and they were willing to talk about themselves, which cannot easily be scripted.

Here is a link to the website for the organization that produced the film:

GroundSpark