The best films are ones where real stories are played out and this is a real story of triumph over unimaginable odds. Erin Gruwell, played by Hilary Swank, is a newly qualified secondary school teacher who gets a job in Wilson High School, Long Beach, California. She is an idealistic (i can identify with that) young teacher presented with the dregs of the school system who have been written off by the school and the local education board.

One day she intercepts a note from one of the students that pokes fun at a guy with big nose and that leads onto a passionate and often heated debate about how and why the holocaust happened and that in turn leads to the diary of Anne Frank and what started out as a hopeless class turns into a civil rights movement that is still active  today – 10 years later.

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Freedom Writers
[DVD]
[2007]

This is a review from Amazon

For those emotionally secure people, such as myself, I found it hard to keep my emotionally secured feelings emotionally secured whilst watching this film. It was edited fantastically, shot brilliantly, acted amazingly and worked together to form a perfect whole.

There is, of course, the fact that it is an all too common issue, one which we see all too much of, to little effect. There is also the fact that the same old shootings and naive do-gooders make their respective appearances, however, the primary synopsis of the teacher trying to make herself understood, to a class trying to make themselves understood goes hand-in-hand for a movie that crescendoes and breaks the emotional barriers of the most secure people.

My friend cries at nothing. My friend sobbed in the cinema.
Watch it. Alone. Absorb. Then buy the book!

Freedom Writers