Rethink Resources

Last Saturday I attended a benefit here in Milwaukee for a new documentary called Cut: Teens and Self-Injury. The movie was made by a Wisconsin filmmaker and will be premiering in April at the Wisconsin Film Festival in Madison.

I was cautious because so many young people I know who are or have been in the sex trade use self-injury to deal with difficult emotions and for all sorts of reasons. I wondered if the film would be able to present the issue in a kind and complicated way.

I have to say I was impressed with the film. I really liked the use the artwork – both pictures and poetry from teens. I like that youth voices were strong and clear and mostly not mediated or contradicted by adults or experts.

I liked how the movie was able to present common beliefs about self-injury – like that it’s mostly females who do it – and then complicate those ideas by offering evidence to the contrary – like how self-injury has been documented in prison as equal in males and females or the voices of men and non-gender-conforming people who self-injure. And left it up to the viewer to consider the possibilities of what we know and don’t know.

And Shirley Manson from Garbage offered a great perspective about her own experiences with self-injury.

The film is almost an hour long. I think it’ll be a good tool for opening up a discussion about cutting and self-injury as a whole with teens. And as most of the youth talked about in the movie – it’s astonishingly common with very little understanding out there about how to support youth.

Check out the site for more info. Cut: Teens and Self-Injury