From the film’s Kickstarter page

The high rate of school pushout, when students are asked to leave before graduation, has declined, but is still a serious issue in the District. The Washington Post reported that seven schools had been underreporting their suspensions for the past two years. Filmmaker Hannah Peterson hopes to dramatize this systemic failure of our youth by telling the stories of people, not statistics.

That’s why she’s developing the short film East of The River, recently featured as Kickstarter’s project of the day. The film observes teenage girl Teonna in the aftermath of her suspension from school, following along on her now empty school day as she meets other kids who’ve been similarly afflicted.

On their Kickstarter page, the filmmakers explain that author Monique Morris, in her book Pushout, offers this startling statistic: “black girls are 16 percent of the student population, but nearly one-third of all girls referred to law enforcement and more than one-third of all female school-based arrests.”

Still, the proposed film is no alarmist 60 Minutes segment, but a true account of what life feels like for Anacostia kids. Far from depicting the kind of ham-fisted melodrama that outsiders may imagine their lives to be, Peterson and her collaborators were more concerned with honesty and authenticity.

Lest anyone be concerned that a white woman telling the story of minority youth is merely performing some jaundiced brand of ghetto tourism, Peterson is a D.C. native who first encountered the school-to-prison pipeline problem when she and Stacey Eunnae, an education attorney, worked on a short documentary exploring the subject in the District. The experience rattled around Peterson’s mind all throughout film school until she began to conceive what she calls, “a more nuanced version of a day in the life of teens in D.C.”

For Peterson and Eunnae, storytelling is more than just a form of entertainment, but an effective tool to enact change. They saw the opportunity to create a film about underrepresented subjects while drawing more attention to one of the most overlooked root causes of systemic oppression.

“In my advocacy work, telling people’s stories is how we change people’s minds,” explained Eunnae, who also co-wrote the film. “The stories I often hear from the students and families I work with don’t often make it outside of the suspension hearing or the court room where I’m advocating.”

For the casting process, Peterson was inspired by filmmaker Rahman Bahrani, who once spoke of a gymnasium filled to the brim with kids auditioning for roles in his film Chop Shop. “I always wanted to do that, just have an open call audition and see people all day.” Casting through Instagram and other nontraditional means also shows a kinship with Tangerine director Sean Baker, with whom Peterson worked on the upcoming film The Florida Project. Baker serves as an advisor for this crowdfunding campaign.

While most films made in D.C. stick to the historical landmarks and paint the city as little more than an iconic backdrop for political intrigue, Peterson’s decision to cast real D.C. teens and use the less visible locations where they actually hang out with will create a slice of fiction that brings Washington to life on the big screen. In addition to notes from the young actors who’ll be in front of the camera, the screenplay was penned in collaboration with a Youth Advisory board of six students whose stories and insight helped shape the final product on the page.

“When people think about Anacostia they think about shooting and drugs,” says India Pendleton, a Ballou High School student and the leader of the Youth Advisory. “They don’t really come to Anacostia to see that people like me work really hard so we can have a good education. We work day and night in school, we work jobs after school. We do a lot because we know that people view us a certain way, so we have to work harder to get that target off of us.”

While Peterson and her team plan to screen East of The River on the festival circuit in the hopes of garnering interest to expand it into a feature film or television series, their chief focus is local.

“We want this film to go beyond telling a story, to comment on a disparity and an injustice that we see right here the capital of the United States,” Peterson explained. “It’s really important for us to have screenings that are really community oriented in Southeast DC and other places affected by this issue. That’s way more important to us than being seen at Sundance.”

East of the River has met its crowdfunding goal of $15,000, but you still have three days to contribute to its Kickstarter here.