Wu Shwu-mey (吳淑美) had no concept of documentary filmmaking when she first picked up the camera in 1989 to record her students for research purposes at her inclusive school, where special needs and mainstream students study side by side.
Nineteen years of footage later, the National Hsinchu University of Education (NHUE) professor made her first documentary, Classmates (同班同學) — which follows two mainstream and two special needs children from nursery school to adulthood.
The government ordered Wu’s school to close in 2009, and her final junior high class will graduate next year. But what started as casual recording has turned into a documentary filmmaking career that is still going strong — with three complete productions and two more in the pipeline.
Photo courtesy of Wu Shwu-mey
Last month, Wu’s latest production, Chang Chang Going to School Overseas (晨晨跨海上學去) was released in DVD format after winning a Bronze Remi award at WorldFest Houston. The candid and heartwarming film follows a Chinese boy with learning and behavioral difficulties who comes to Taiwan to attend Wu’s school. Her next endeavors will feature an inclusive cheerleading team and Fulung Noodle Shop (福榮麵坊), a restaurant run by Wu and her husband that employs special needs teenagers.
INCLUSIVE EDUCATION
Wu first learned about the idea of inclusive education in 1978 as a doctoral student in psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, a time when the term did not even exist. Her adviser had experimented with the inclusive classrooms before, and the idea stuck with Wu.
Photo courtesy of Wu Shwu-mey
“Inclusive education is an attitude toward life — it doesn’t have to be explained in academic terms,” she says. “It’s basically learning how to interact with people different from you.”
In 1989, NHUE’s president started encouraging its professors to carry out educational experiments, and provided a classroom for Wu to recruit a nursery school class that would be one-third special needs and two-thirds mainstream.
The experiment grew from there, and more than a decade later, Wu had her own building with students up to junior high and started the Fulung Inclusive Education Foundation (福榮融合教育推廣基金會).
Photo courtesy of Wu Shwu-mey
Once the school was up and running, filming the students became almost an obsession for Wu.
“I really did not know what a documentary film was, but I’m the kind of person who is determined to keep doing the same thing over and over again without really thinking of the end goal. So I ended up with a lot of footage to tell a complete story,” she says.
LEARNING ON THE FLY
Wu says that due to a lack of resources and knowledge, she pretty much figured out the craft of filmmaking on her own. But she does see parallels between academic qualitative research and making a documentary.
“There is a lot of observation in qualitative research,” she says. “I think it’s the same type of observation — just one is audiovisual and the other is listening to subjects talk and taking notes.”
Even though the first film spanned 19 years, Wu says the footage was still manageable because she did not just leave the camera constantly running in the classrooms. She personally followed the students and filmed scenes she thought were interesting. Sometimes, she would see something happening — maybe a mainstream child going out of his or her way to help a special needs classmate — and run to her office to grab the camera.
However, there still are differences between art and academia. At first, Wu’s footage was all direct shots of what the subjects were doing. After looking at films made by professionals, she learned that environmental shots were important too.
“I realized that if you want the audience to like the film, you can’t just string a bunch of scenes together,” she says. “For example, I was shooting a sports meet in the rain. Instead of just filming the event, I shot footage of the raindrops hitting the ground.”
Editing was also an issue, as she says her first cut for Classmates was “a mess.”
“It was confusing which child was which, since their appearances changed so much over time,” she says. “So I wrote a draft in essay form, and decided to tell the story backwards from their adulthood.”
Working with amateur editors around her, they would meet to discuss the best way to present each part of the story. It was not until Chang Chang Going to School Overseas that Wu had professional help from Liao Ching-sung (廖慶松), known as a long-time collaborator with Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢).
After Classmates, the idea for a second film arose when Wu decided to submit the documentary to a number of film festivals.
“You had to write down your filmmaking experience, and I felt that it didn’t look good to just have one film,” she says. “So I decided to make the second one, and after the second one I had a chance to make the third one … and because I never put the camera down, there will be a fourth one and fifth one.”
END OF AN ERA
Due to changes in the Special Education Act (特殊教育法) in 2009, Wu says she was no longer allowed to use special education resources to serve mainstream students, and the school was suddenly ordered to close by 2014. Wu still has an inclusive class of junior high school students outside of the school, but she says she will probably stop after they graduate.
She says the details of the closure will be shown in her next film about the school’s inclusive cheerleading squad.
“I’ve done it for so many years, and I thought, so be it,” she says. “But now, due to Taiwan’s poor economy and low birth rate, I fell that maybe we should end this.”
With this abrupt conclusion to her experiment, Wu is glad that she took up the camera.
“Things can just disappear in an instant,” she says. “But at least I still have these images. I have recordings of all that I feel that should be preserved.”
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