Almost one year ago, the conversation around gun violence forever changed when 17 people died during a school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Some of the surviving students became national faces of the gun violence prevention movement, starting March For Our Lives, a student-led demonstration that translated into a national school walk out, policy discussions, and a voter registration tour. Back in Parkland, Florida, other students stayed at home, steeped in the same tragedy, and tried to piece their lives back together.
HBO’s new documentary Song of Parkland tells the story of just a few of those students. On Feb. 14, the day of the shooting, during their rehearsal for a children’s theater show, these students were ushered into a closet by their drama teacher Melody Herzfeld as a Code Red sounded throughout the school. Months later, in June, they appeared at the Tony Awards, singing “Seasons of Love,” and Herzfeld, who’s taught at the school since 2003, accepted the Tony for the Excellence in Theatre Education Award. She was nominated by a former student from her first year at Stoneman Douglas; that student is now a drama teacher.
“I know that maybe on any other given day, no one would have known who I was,” Herzfeld told ELLE.com about the award. “I already knew I was doing a good job. It’s a beautiful way to commemorate things, but also in the light of this horrible, unspeakable tragedy. I don’t take that lightly at all. I don’t take it with any kind of folly.”
The documentary follows what happened between those two events, as Herzfeld guides her students, allowing them to use art, music, and theater to process trauma, pain, and loss. They spend time writing songs together, and they collectively decide they need to finish the production they started before the shooting. One student describes the drama department as a place of normalcy, inside a building that’s a constant reminder of what happened.
“I saw that they were able to self heal,” Herzfeld said of her time working and creating with the students. “They were able to console. They were able to actually even grow stronger in their voices. There’s still a lot of confusion, don’t get me wrong. Nothing is done by a long shot here. But, as far as this point in time, they needed to know that it’s okay to move forward, and it’s okay to feel happy… Tragedy really separates you. It makes truth come out in who you are, and this is what happened to them.”
She says that a lot of the students were unsure of what to do and “kind of destroyed,” but that the documentary gave them their own chance to be heard, even if they weren’t the ones gracing magazine covers.
Amy Schatz, the film’s director, told ELLE.com, “[These are] not necessarily the kids who are out there front and center, not all of them at least, watching and being on the news and speaking out and taking political action… I think the difference is that we actually just took a quiet approach and just listened to what it was that they were doing in their lives.”
And, for Herzfeld, it’s a film that represents more than what happened in the confines of their school. “I think it’s for the every day kid, the kids that go through this kind of thing all the time in their neighborhood. Why is it that now Parkland is on the map, but gun violence has been happening for years and nothing’s changed, nothing’s been done? We listen to it for a little while, and we move on and we kind of forget about it. Why?” She says that as they approach the one-year anniversary there are days when it seems like the shooting was ages ago, and there are days when it feel like it just happened.
The Giffords Law Center reports that in 2018, 26 states and Washington, D.C. enacted 67 new gun control laws. According to Vox, that’s triple the number of those enacted in 2017. After Parkland, a number of elected officials talked at length about the need for stricter gun laws, and for many, it became a part of their midterm election campaigns. Lucy McBath, a gun control advocate whose son died from gun violence, ran for Congress for the very first time and won. But 2018 was still the worst year for school shootings in the United States, with 113 people killed or injured.
There is more to be done and no doubt more tragedy ahead in the fight for common sense gun laws. But Song of Parkland shows that these particular kids are all right, or at least they’re on their way, with the help of time and art and a teacher willing to show them how.
HBO’s Song of Parkland premieres on Feb. 7 at 7 P.M.
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