informed: the new normal
a resource page for teens (& anyone else who needs to know)
Film: Movie Night!
Quinceanera (2006)
As Magdalena's 15th birthday approaches, her simple, blissful life is complicated by the discovery that she's pregnant. Kicked out of her house, she finds a new family with her great-granduncle and gay cousin.
Let's Talk About Sex (2009), a documentary by James Houston
This movie takes a revealing look at how American attitudes towards adolescent sexuality affect today’s teenagers. We live in a society that uses sex to sell everything from lipstick to laptops. Yet fear and silence around sex and sexuality also permeate our culture. Teens are paying a terrible price for this confusion in unintended pregnancy, STDs, and even HIV.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)
This coming-of-age classic follows the ups and downs of a group of high school students over the course of a year in 1980s California.
The Education of Shelby Knox (2005)
Shelby Knox is a deeply religious teenager who joins the Lubbock Youth Commission, a group of high school students representing a youth voice in city government. Lubbock has some of the highest teen pregnancy and STD rates in the nation, the "solution" to which is a strict abstinence only sex education curriculum in the public schools and a conservative preacher who urges kids to pledge abstinence until marriage. When the teens confront Lubbock's sexual health crisis and campaign for comprehensive sex education, Knox throws herself into the battle with missionary fervor, struggling to reconcile her newfound political beliefs with her conservative religious views.
Why Us? Left Behind and Dying (2010)
An in-depth examination of the reasons why HIV rates are disproportionately high in black communities. It was made from the point of view of a small group of inner-city African-American teenagers, ages 14-17, from Westinghouse High School in Pittsburgh, PA. The students conduct most of the interviews and one of them narrates it. They participate as “co-researchers” along with the filmmakers. They ask probing and direct questions of scientists, health workers and people in their own community with HIV and full- blown AIDS. he students are also research subjects within the documentary. As the film unfolds they discuss their ideas and beliefs about HIV as well as their own safe and/or unsafe sexual practices.
Saved! (2004)
Mary is a good Christian girl who goes to a good Christian high school where she has good Christian friends and a perfect Christian boyfriend, Dean. Her life seems perfect, until the day that she finds out that Dean may be gay. After "seeing" a vision of Jesus in a pool, she does everything in her power to help him turn straight, including offering up her virginity. But none of it helps because Dean's caught and sent to a "degayification" center and Mary ends up pregnant. It's during her time of need that she becomes real friends with the school's set of "misfits," including Cassandra, the school's only Jewish girl; Roland, Hilary Faye's wheelchair-bound brother, and Patrick, the skateboarder son of the school's principal.