By Edgar Garcia
A Filmmaker at UTRGV is making a movie centering the experiences of victims of school shootings,
“This is not a Drill” is an upcoming movie written by UTRGV student, actor and spokesperson Brenda Garza and directed by Alberto Ornelas. The movie features and centers the experiences of students while a shooting is taking place.
Director of the film Alberto Ornelas had the original idea of the movie and worked to bring it to light. He originally intended the film to be a character study of a shooter, but was scared to bring forward a story on the subject from a victim’s perspective.
“Originally when I started writing it, we wanted to follow it on how broken the system was,” Ornelas said. “But the more and more Brenda and I talked about it, we knew the true story was behind the kids. And the thing about it is, when you go in the direction of showing the story of the kids, and the terror of the kids, you create a huge controversial experience. Because not everyone agrees with what were about to do”.
Garza specifically wanted the children’s perspective to be the point of the movie due to an oversaturation of media that center the experiences of the shooter and not the victims of school shootings.
She rewrote the movie with this perspective in mind and acts within the movie as a supporting character. She spoke about how important this was to her as a mother of a child going through anxiety attacks over the fear of shootings.
“My youngest, which is Jalie Briseno, she has been going to school and she’s been running these drills since she’s like in first or second grade and ever since that first one, she has been traumatized. She is a fifth grader, and she is still traumatized,” Garza said. “And this is another reason why this story is so important, is because even though something hasn’t happened in our own community, they’re still being traumatized right now, teachers as well.”
Licensed Specialist In School Psychology Intern Gina Flores is one of the people that deals with the trauma of children in concern to school shootings and the anxiety that they deal with as well as her own fears. She spoke on how these depictions of shooters affect kids and how the media doesn’t cover the victims at all.
“I definitely think it’s not a good thing, because like they say y’know these kids do kinda pick up on that,” Flores said. “The media definitely glorifies these shooters in a way that we never know what it’s doing to the next one and not so much the victims as I feel, you really don’t hear about them much after. That is what we should be focusing on after, these families and how they cope with it and we really don’t do much of that,” Flores said .
The film is not out yet but a teaser is available for viewing here.
