Two African-American men, a Hispanic woman, a Hmong Asian-American woman, a Palestinian woman, two White women, and two White men sit in a room.
It could be a small group in any college in America, but in this case, the group has been brought together to form a hot mess of diversity prepared to engage — if they only knew how. In Lee Mun Wah’s new film, “If These Halls Could Talk,” the filmmaker explores the process of the group’s unlayering. Members peel back the distrust that’s built up in their lives in order to see each other in a true light for the first time and to experience the real payoff of diversity of any kind: a real heart-felt conversation with a person different from oneself.
No wonder such real conversations don’t happen in real life more spontaneously. As the film shows, it takes real work, essentially a therapy session led by Lee, 65, a trained psychologist and diversity trainer, who in a Zen-like way steers the discussion.
True to its title, if the halls of colleges across America could talk, they might reveal the yearning students have to connect diversity’s dots. Students want real connections, real conversations but too often settle for the superficial. They are cordial but content to walk on by each other as if diversity were a parade and campus life a charade.
It all makes for an artfully disguised teaching tool for educators, intended as a tool for the classroom. At times, the film has the look of MTV’s “Real World.” But that show is as real as yesterday’s eyelashes, a program about pretty people in extravagant places for the purposes of fake narratives and sexy conflicts.
Lee’s film, however, gathers real people and makes them live four days of summer on a ranch-style retreat in Ukiah, a remote part of Northern California. He gets them to talk to each other like they never would in public.
The sessions yielded more than a dozen hours of group sessions on video that Lee has assembled for a series of films to be released during the next few years. Parts 1 and 2, which debuted in Chicago in early November, are introductory by design. But there are little gems in the film, moments that will strike a chord with educators and other audience members who get to be a “fly on the wall” as the discussions unravel.
