A brief conversation with Lee Hirsch, director of the documentary "Bully"

When I attended the B’nai Brith Youth Organization’s (BBYO) International Convention last year in Atlanta, I witnessed one of the main highlights for the more than 900 teens who gathered there last February. It was when director Lee Hirsch addressed them about his soon to be released documentary “The Bully Project” (the title was later shortened to “Bully”), and then proceeded to show them a 10-minute preview clip from the film. It’s not an easy thing to silence a group of 900 teens under one roof, but this small excerpt managed to do that. And as a result, the word was spread amongst the members of BBYO about how powerful and important “Bully” was to create widespread awareness of bullying amongst their peers and the devastating effects it can have upon them.

“The experience I had with the BBYO teens when I showed a part of the film to them in Atlanta was remarkable. As a result, “Bully” was shown to over 250,000 kids across North America,” Hirsch told the Grapevine last month, when he was in Montreal for the launch of the DVD of “Bully”, which took place at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ Bourgie Hall, and was held under the auspices of the Jasmin Roy Foundation.

“When they saw the film, many of them told me that as a result, they identified themselves as being bullied before and thanked me for telling their stories,” he said. “And then there were others who were silent witnesses who never realized that they were bullies themselves, and promised that they would never bully anyone again.”

“Bully” is a powerful, compelling 100 minute documentary that chronicles five teenagers across the U.S. who were subjected to a great deal of harsh psychological and physical bullying for a number of reasons, whether it be for the way they looked or for their sexual orientation. It also profiled two sets of parents who faced the tragic consequences of their children being bullied, and the action they took to make sure no one else’s children had to go through what their children endured. The DVD version, which is released by Alliance Films, not only contains the entire documentary, but also includes deleted scenes, a featurette dealing with the Bully Project at work, and updates on the people whose stories were told in the documentary.

Hirsch is proud of the impact “Bully” has had on teens across North America and the action they have taken to prevent any further bullying of their peers. “The film has managed to build a lot of valuable resources and the Bully Project is continually evolving,” he said. “The DVD will become part of an educational kit that is going to be distributed to schools and youth organizations, so that we can make the content of the project stronger, so that we can learn more and more about bullying, its devastating effects and what can be done to stop it altogether.”

This post originally appearing in my Grapevine column in the March 16, 2013 edition of The West End Times.