- Welcome to POV .
I'm Pete Schwaba, host of PBS Wisconsin's Director's Cut .
Tonight's film is Portraits and Dreams , an aptly titled film
about a teacher in rural Kentucky,
who in the 1970s encouraged her students
to photograph themselves and create stories
around these self portraits.
That's right folks, the selfie was around
long before the iPhone.
The teacher is Wendy Ewald,
who also co-directed Portraits and Dreams .
Ewald urged her students to take pictures
after exploring their thoughts.
She would have her students sit with classmates in a dark room
and share their fears and aspirations.
It was after this exercise that Ewald saw the true art
from her students, who took groundbreaking photos
that evolved into narratives that eventually became a book
titled Portraits and Dreams .
The film showcases the idea of children
as visionary photographers.
Ewald calls the photos the spine of the film,
but it was the idea of finding out
where life had taken her young photographers
that turned that book into a documentary.
Ewald says that she and co-director Elizabeth Barret
were inspired to make it happen
when a former student contacted her in 2006
and told her how much that project
thirty years earlier meant to her.
It's a decades-old journey
from camera, to book, to film, to your TV.
Portraits and Dreams starts now on PBS Wisconsin,
your home for independent film.