Freedom Writers

Set in the 1990s, the film starts with footages of the LA riots, and voice-over of character Eva, a Latino student whose views of the world is shared by her peers, that the streets are a warzone, and that school/ education is futile. Hillary Swank plays Erin Gruwell, who arrives at Wilson High with idealistic and dreamy lesson plans for her uninterested freshmen students made up of various ethnicities in a classroom where hostility and tension lingers in the air.

Erin tries to engage her students with various means, but what really connected her to the students was the circulated picture of how all blacks look like (with thick lips, etc) in class that sparked the heated discussion about race and colour, and the 'Line game' where she found out many of them had their friends killed in everyday fightings. Motivated to make a difference, she presented all of them with journals for them to pen down the killings and trauma that had become a part of their lives, with the condition that: 1) they must write everyday and she will flip through the pages without reading them to ensure that they are writing and 2) if they want her to read it, they will put it into a cupboard that she will lock up.

Facing difficulties in getting funding and support from the school for books (due to a lack of trust for the students) and excursions that will help broaden the students' minds, Erin took on additional jobs for the cash to do so.

Their trip to the Museum of Tolerance made an impact on all the students as they witnessed the attempted eradication of (a group of people) Jews in the Holocaust, and Erin also arranged for survivors of the Holocaust to meet the students to talk about their lives over dinner. Erin gave out "The Diary of Anne Frank" to her students as a way to get into their hearts and minds, a motivation for their journal-writing. When Erin knew how the book made an impact on the students, she changed the assignment of writing a book review to a a letter to Miep Gies, the Dutch woman who hid the Franks, telling her how the book made them feel. The class eventually stopped seeing one another as "people of another ethnicity", but for each other.

This inspiring and touching movie had me in tears at certain parts, and definitely left me wanting to read two books: The Diary of Anne Frank and The Freedom Writers Diary (the actual book that the movie is based on).