Bully

Thursday, September 20
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm
(Kentucky Center)

Cynthia Lowen is the co-filmmaker of Bully, a feature documentary following a “year in the life” of America’s bullying crisis, which she developed, produced, and wrote in partnership with Emmy and Sundance Award-winning director Lee Hirsch. Filmed over the course of the 2009-2010 school year, Bully opens a window onto the pained and often endangered lives of bullied kids, revealing a problem that transcends geographic, racial, ethnic, and economic borders. It documents the responses of teachers and administrators to aggressive behaviors that defy “kids will be kids” clichés, and it captures a growing movement among parents, youth, and educators to change how bullying is handled in schools, in communities and in society as a whole.

Drawing from Bully’s success, Cynthia Lowen and her team of filmmakers created The Bully Project Social Action Campaign, a collaborative effort in partnership with multiple organizations, foundations, brands, and corporate sponsors that aims to equip parents, kids, educators, and advocates with the tools to transform their communities. Partners include JPMorgan Chase & Co., Sears, The National Center for Learning Disabilities, Bing, the United Federation of Teachers, Autism Speaks, BBYO, Ashoka, and many others. This spring, The Bully Project announced the 1 Million Kids to See Bully campaign, which makes the film available to students in theaters, free of cost, with a wraparound educational program. The campaign will continue to expand through the 2012-2013 school year.

Through her work on Bully, Lowen has lectured extensively on bullying and school climate, as well as the social impact of documentary films and the future of trans-media projects, speaking at The Open Society Foundations, the International Conference on Human Values, the Producers Guild of America, New York Women in Film and Television, Colorado College, the University of Northern Iowa, the Tribeca Film Festival’s Tribeca Talks series, and Silverdocs, in addition to numerous Q&A’s for groups such as the National Center for Learning Disabilities, the United Federation of Teachers, student groups, and many others.