Chain Camera

There's a great idea behind Kirby Dick's winning documentary about student life at California's John Marshall High School. At the start of the 1999-2000 school year, Dick handed 10 students 10 video cameras, and asked them to film their lives. After a week, those 10 students passed their cameras to 10 other students, and so on, until graduation. The idea was to form the cinematic equivalent of a chain letter, with the cameras wending their way through the student population and into their lives with minimal interference from the filmmakers. Then, out of a pool of hundreds of "video diaries," Dick selected 15 students and edited their week's worth of footage down to s...