Documentary featuring Juneau Alaska Music Matters wraps up filming, gets ‘concept reels’ screening
- Mark Sabbatini
- 10 hours ago
- 4 min read
Planned full-length film features northernmost and southernmost El Sistema programs in US; most local footage shot a year ago, with crew returning this week for followup interviews
By Mark Sabbatini
Juneau Independent
The general consensus of the teenage musicians is the camera makes them look noticeably younger — but, hey, it is film of them from nearly a year ago.
A quintet of students in the Juneau Alaska Music Matters program, along with about 20 instructors and supporters, got a preview Tuesday of a planned feature-length documentary featuring the program and a similar one in El Paso, Texas. Six minutes of footage from Juneau and four from Texas were screened by filmmakers who spent two weeks in Alaska’s capital last spring.
"It was a good mix of talking and representation of the JAMM community," said Geo Abad, who played viola during a few songs the quintet of seventh- and eighth-grade students performed prior to the screening and a discussion about the documentary by its director. "And it wasn’t overdone so it was great."
The intent of the project, screened with the title "Play It Up," is featuring the northernmost and southernmost of the 140 nationwide El Sistema USA music education programs, said Steve Gomer, the movie’s director. He’s been a television and movie director for nearly 40 years, with credits including the 2017 movie “All Saints” and TV series such as “The Unit,” “Veronica Mars” and “The Guardian.”
Gomer and some of his crew returned to Juneau on Sunday to shoot additional footage that wrapped up Tuesday — the final two days of filming planned — to follow up on the 55 hours of video captured last year.
"The last time we got great stuff in the classroom," he said in an interview before presenting the previews he referred to as "concept reels." "What we didn't get was interviews with kids like ’How do you feel?’ ‘What's going on?’ ‘What are you getting from this?’ ‘How has it changed you?’ That kind of thing."
A key focus of the interviews was an element of Juneau’s program that surprised filmmakers after they arrived last year, Gomer said.
"The other programs are mostly music, which is great. El Paso is just music," he said, "The fact that the component here is Tlingit language and Tlingit culture, that's what surprised us. In the stuff you can research that doesn't come up. So when we got here and we saw what was going on we were just knocked out. So we needed to come back to talk to the community."
JAMM and other affiliated programs in the United States are modeled on Venezuela’s El Sistema, a publicly financed music education program launched in 1975 and now emulated in more than 60 countries.
The Juneau program founded in 2010 links its tuition-free music learning to the traditional songs, dance and language of the area’s original Tlingit inhabitants. The southernmost group is the Tocando Music Project, under the umbrella of the El Paso Symphony Youth Orchestra.
Gomer said he hopes to complete the film in six months, at which point he’ll start presenting it at festivals and elsewhere in search of a distributor. He said he also plans to produce shorter films for each of the Juneau and El Paso programs.
The preview clips from both programs feature snippets of performances interspaced with interviews of students and instructors, who talk about how the program expands academic and social boundaries beyond music. An instructor in El Paso, for instance, talked about the challenges facing economically disadvantaged students whose families can’t afford instruments while a girl in the program talked about being bullied.
"We talked to her mom — she cried," Gomer told those watching the preview clips. "And this girl cried every day. She didn't want to go to school. The mom found the program and said, ‘Well, maybe you try this program.’ And then when we talked to her after that she's like, ‘I had all these friends. They support me.’ I think it's just incredible what goes on and that program."
The El Paso program, which has about 40 students, is far smaller than Juneau’s with an estimated 500. Among the places the crew filmed Juneau participants last year was an outdoor performance at the Juneau Maritime Festival and a “Gratitude” concert featuring about a dozen traditional Tlingit songs in the cedar clan house at the Walter Soboleff Building.
The quintet of students performing at Tuesday’s screening included mentors in the JAMM program who have performed with other ensembles such as the Juneau Symphony. They saw themselves only in short clips from earlier performances in the preview reel — and didn’t necessarily think their best moments were captured — but they said being filmed last year and the additional interactions this week were enlivening.
"It was very new to me, but it was a very good experience," said Traeus Mateo, who played first violin during the quintet’s performance Tuesday.
Lorrie Heagy, founder of the JAMM program, told the audience after the screening the film crew put in exhaustive efforts to engage with the students and capture the program’s mission.
"They have been working with our children just with love and kindness, and a real sense of just wanting to make the best out of this program," she said. "So we couldn't have asked for a better group of people who are human and wanted to put out stories that matter."
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.
