Representation

 Welcome back guys to another blog of mine! Today, I will be discussing the representation in my movie opener. Representation was important from the beginning of us starting our project because we wanted our story to be universal and authentic to the real world. We asked ourselves three key questions: Who is represented? Is it fair or stereotypical? How are we challenging norms? And what could we improve on?

Age/Life Stage

Our film opener reflects a specific and intentional demographic mix. All four main characters are teenage girls between the ages of 15 and 16. This means they are around the life stage of late adolescence, where individual identities are forming, and they are likely experiencing grief for the first time.

Race & Ethnicity:

In terms of race and ethnicity, the group is diverse or multicultural. My character, Raina, and Ngoc are Asian. Jahzara and Emijola are Black. Specifically, Raina is a Chinese-American, and Ngoc is a Vietnamese-American. Jahzara is a Jamaican-American, and Emijola is a mix of a Haitian and Nigerian-American. We aimed to have a diverse cast because we wanted to portray that our friendship was built on our shared cultures. 

Gender/Sexuality:

All the main characters are straight females and present as cisgender. Our opener does not specifically explore the other LGBTQ+ identities.

Socioeconomic Status:

In our movie opener, Raina, Ngoc, and Emijola are from middle-class, suburban backgrounds. Whereas Jahzara is from an upper-class, wealthy family. 

Religion:

Religion is not explicitly represented in our movie opener. In other words, we do not specifically state the religions of each character. This choice leaves it open to the audience for interpretation and keeps the focus on shared human emotions rather than individual beliefs. 

Now, we purposely worked against stereotypes to ensure healthy and positive portrayals. Emijola's grief is depression and silence, not the stereotypical "angry Black woman." Emijola is presented as an intelligent young teenage girl who simply lost someone she truly valued in life. Moreover, Ngoc's neutral or mediation mindset stems from her natural character trait of being empathetic, not because of the "model minority" stereotype. In addition, Raina's denial is genuinely a complex psychological facade, not because she is a "mean girl."

We are challenging representation in several key ways. First, we present a diverse friend group where the main conflict is universal human emotion, not their racial or cultural differences. In other words, their backgrounds tell the audience who they are, but are not the reason for the conflict in the plot. Rather, their individual flawed psychological responses to shared trauma do. Crucially, however, we challenge the simplistic narratives about class and wealth. By making Jahzara the character from a wealthy family, we directly confront the idea that money protects you or "money buys happiness." Although Jahzara's family is rich, its resources could not cure her cancer or buy her more time. This reinforces our theme that grief is one of the few things that happiness or safety cannot be purchased. Ultimately, our movie opener argues that there is not just a single way to grieve, which challenges representations of how people from certain backgrounds "should" behave in pain. 

While we built detailed foundations of diversity and representation. Things we could improve on are having a more diverse representation of the LGBTQ+ community. For example, instead of having all four girls as straight, we could have made one of the characters bisexual, and this identity could have added to the impact of the grief they felt over the death of Jahzara. Overall, however, I felt that our movie opener had a fair share of equal representation, as we purposely did this to enforce that grief is a universal experience that is based on human emotions, not backgrounds.