411: Just Do It

“Do It Your Damn Self” doesn’t sound like a typical name for a youth festival. And, rightfully so. It isn’t. DIYDS National Youth and Film Festival is the longest running youth-produced festival in the world. For twelve years, it has been celebrating the voices and visions of youngsters only. This year, three locally produced youth videos were selected (from more than 150 entries) to be part of the fifteen-film fest. These videos were produced thanks in large part to the also atypical Chicago-based Community TV Network, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to teaching low-income youths about video. “We took five students—Tamar Bailey, Krystal Newson, Emonte Vaughn, Marissa Szewczyk and Kory Jackson—to Boston for the festival,” explains CTVN video instructor Lauren Pollock, “and they had an amazing time. They got to sit on a panel and have other kids ask them about their work.” Work that meant a great deal to each of them. “All of my students had or were experiencing depression, so they decided to make their video about that,” says Pollock. “Another one of our videos—‘Number Seventeen’—was about the seventeenth student killed last year who was one of their friends.”