It was a Valentine’s Day massacre. On February 14, 2018, a student gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing fourteen students and three staffers and wounding seventeen others.
Given the heroics of Parkland’s students, it’s fitting that their school was named after Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a writer, suffragette, and conservationist who defended the Florida Everglades.
But Cheryl Horner McDonough’s Parkland Rising doesn’t dwell on the events of that horrible day. Instead, this absorbing documentary chronicles the survivors’ “graduation” to new lives as anti-gun-violence activists on the world stage. They turned their anger to action, taking aim at the National Rifle Association, politicians in the gun lobby’s pocket, and laws that enable school shooters while enriching the manufacturers and sellers of weapons, such as the semi-automatic rifle that wreaked havoc at their public school.
“My initial reaction was to get political,” Jaclyn Corin, then the junior class president, says in the film. Or, as survivor Matt Deitsch told Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show: “I know you want us to be kids, but we have important things to do.”
The opening montage of Parkland Rising shows adolescent organizers appearing on TV programs including The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Face the Nation, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and hobnobbing with superstars including George Clooney. The sequence establishes the student’s newfound celebrity status, but it isn’t about that celebrity.
While prominent participants such as Emma Gonzalez are seen at rallies and marches, Parkland Rising focuses on pupil David Hogg and Venezuelan-born artist Manuel Oliver, the fifty-ish father of Joaquin Oliver, a seventeen-year-old immigration advocate nicknamed “Guac” who was slain during the school massacre.
Both fire at the NRA, the target they hold largely responsible for the misery that engulfed their lives in a hail of bullets.
Much of the ninety-two-minute film follows this twentieth-first century Children’s Crusade as it embarks on a national “March For Our Lives” to raise awareness and change gun laws. This involves direct actions, such as a “die-in” at a supermarket owned by campaign contributors to a pro-NRA candidate.
There are rallies, including one in Texas, where Gonzalez addresses the crowd, demanding universal background checks for gun buyers and a ban on gun sales to domestic abusers.
In Massachusetts, following in the footsteps of the civil rights movement, the hardy youngsters embark on a fifty-mile march to the headquarters of Springfield’s firearms manufacturer Smith & Wesson, spending the night en route in sleeping bags at what appears to be a school. They also go to Newtown, Connecticut, site of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that took twenty-six lives, mostly young children. What would have been Guac’s nineteenth birthday is observed by protesting at the NRA’s headquarters Fairfax, Virginia.
Throughout their ordeals, the youthful protagonists are dogged by continuing outbursts of mass shootings. On August 3, 2019, Oliver was painting a mural at Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center when an anti-Hispanic fanatic opened fire nearby in El Paso, murdering twenty-three people and injuring another twenty-three, mostly Latinx.
The demonstrators are also frequently subjected to harassment, much of it aimed at the vocal Hogg. At times, he debates and argues with Second Amendment zealots, insisting that the movement doesn’t want to be “gun grabbers” who ban all firearms, but to enact “common sense gun legislation,” including digitizing gun ownership records plus outlawing easy accessibility to weapons of war and bump stocks that turn ordinary rifles into semi-automatics.
Drive-by harassers shout obscenities and pro-NRA slogans at Hogg, who shrugs it off saying, “It means I’m doing something right.” His father worries about his safety and David’s mother laments, “I wanted my kids to have John Hughes high school days,” referring to the director of ‘80s teen comedies.
Hogg’s comrades also come in for their fair share of abuse. When a counter-protester at an action derides a demonstrator for being a famous media star, the survivor responds that he still has to wake up every morning with the trauma of knowing his school was shot at.
Parkland Rising shows how the bearded, graying Oliver has turned his grief into art, to fight for the anti-gun cause and commemorate his slaughtered son. He has painted more than thirty murals of Guac, some of which appear at rallies where, in a kind of performance art, the determined father bangs a hammer seventeen times to remember the seventeen people shot to death in Parkland.
Oliver also created a one-man show entitled GUAC: My Son, My Hero, which he has presented at venues from Miami to Manhattan. Hamilton’s Leslie Odom Jr. provided artistic advisory and ticket sales help fund “Change the Ref,” the nonprofit advocacy group Oliver co-founded with his wife Patricia. The group’s website says its mission is to “raise awareness about mass shootings through strategic interventions that will reduce the influence of the NRA on the federal level.”
The film culminates with Election Day 2018, when four million newly enfranchised eighteen-year-olds are able to go to the polls for their very first time. Parkland Rising suggests that by bringing out the youth vote, the Parkland crusaders played a role in flipping control of the House of Representatives from the GOP to the Democrats. It also notes an increase in gun control measures, credited largely to what Oliver wittily dubs “the attack of the teenagers.”
Of course, much more needs to be done to end the nation’s epidemic of gun violence, which is why Parkland Rising is coming out now, ahead of the 2020 elections.
The well-crafted, compelling film is executive produced by former Today Show host Katie Couric and rapper will.i.am, founder of the Black Eyed Peas. Director Cheryl Horner McDonough is a two-time Emmy Award winner, including for 2014’s The T Word about transgender youths, with Laverne Cox. McDonough also helmed 2006’s Fat Camp, about teens’ struggles to lose weight.
Given the heroics of Parkland’s students, it’s fitting that their school was named after Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a writer, suffragette, and conservationist who defended the Florida Everglades. One imagines she’d be proud of her namesake students who turned from that horrific Valentine’s Day toward an act of love: fighting for peace and justice.
Parkland Rising will air via National Live Streaming Premiere on June 2 at 8 p.m. EST. There will be an encore live screening on June 5 at 7 p.m. EST. Virtual theatrical screenings begin nationwide on June 5.