When a class that Todd Chandler was teaching in NY showed no surprise at news of yet another mass shooting, his interest was piqued, and he began to dig deeper into the industry of military-style safety provision in US schools. His subsequent Bulletproof competes for a feature Audience Award at DOK and is selected for Ji.hlava Constellations.
Around five years ago, Todd Chandler (whose Bulletproof screens in DOK Leipzig’s competition for the Audience Award) heard students in the class he teaches at Brooklyn College talking about a mass shooting. It had taken place in a school on the West Coast. Chandler realised that none of the students was surprised by the atrocity. During the discussion, the students began to talk about safety provisions in schools and why these shootings were most likely to take place in white, suburban areas. The conversation touched on police in schools and the use of metal detectors.
This set Chandler thinking. He realised a new industry had grown around school security – and that is what he set out to investigate in Bulletproof. Through a friend of his brother, he heard about an ex-Navy SEAL teaching workshops in ‘how to survive a school shooting’.
“I thought, OK, there is something here,” Chandler remembers.
The director’s first step was to attend a school safety convention in Washington DC. He didn’t bring a camera but just went to observe. He saw the special uniforms, the signage, bulletproof white boards, First Aid kits, surveillance systems and bomb proof shelters offered to schools. It was all very American.
There have been films about mass shootings before, notably Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine. Chandler wasn’t interested in making another of those. Nor did he want to make an ‘advocacy’ film. His approach was open-minded. “As I got deeper into the film, I felt this was something more about the broader culture of fear and violence in the United States, ” he explains. He was struck by the ritualistic nature of the rehearsals and pre-enactments the schools were staging. He heard about school authorities hiring ex-secret agents in a bid to make themselves ‘the safest school districts in America.’
This wasn’t just about protecting kids. It was a business as well. In other words, the new school protection industry was an example of ‘disaster capitalism.’
Chandler admits he went into the project with his own assumptions. However, as he spent time on the film, those assumptions began to change. “There were many people I encountered in the making of the film whose approaches I may not agree with but invariably (these) people were trying to do their best,” he observes. They may have been making money but they were also trying to find a solution to a tragic problem.”
For Chandler, a key challenge was to identify the nature of problem. Was it guns or was it a broader cultural one? “It’s a lot easier to say the problem is bullets, so let’s stop bullets, than to say the problem is deeply cultural and historical, how do we address that?”
Bulletproof was due to premiere in SXSW earlier this spring. The festival, though, fell victim to Covid. “We finished the DCP. We finished everything the day before South By South West cancelled.”
Yes, Chandler allowed himself a few moments of self-pity. “In some ways I did but there were so many people who believe in the film that I feel very fortunate.” He knew that the documentary would still get a public television broadcast on PBS. Bulletproof has also been shown in the US at various drive-in sites – so its screenings haven’t just been online. Chandler talks of audiences “honking their horns in an approximation of applause.”
Since the spring, Bulletproof has been very well received at various virtual festivals including Hot Docs, where it won the Emerging International Filmmaker Award.
Several of the subjects shown in the film have also seen Bulletproof. Some were worried that Chandler would “editorialise” and portray them in a negative light but they have said the documentary gives them “a fair shake.”
“All things considered, the film has been having an excellent festival run,” its director says.
This autumn alone, the film screens at Ji.hlava and DOK Leipzig, IDFA in November and DocLisboa in the 2021 – so it certainly hasn’t been ignored. “But what I miss is being able to be there and to meet other filmmakers,” Chandler acknowledges, adding that he misses being able to have discussions with festival audiences like the one with his students that helped inspire Bulletproof in the first place.
