Letters from Homeroom (2000) film still [Enlarge in New Window]

Maya Sara Churi: Letters from Homeroom

Three years ago, filmmaker Maya Churi was rifling through the stuff in her attic when she came across a collection of letters written and received in high school. While some people may shudder unhappily at the thought of returning to those difficult years, Churi was elated. "I wrote a screenplay with 17 scenes based on the letters exchanged between two girls," Churi explains, noting that her letters from the attic merely served as inspiration -- the story is fictional, but borrows heavily from the reality of high school issues and dilemmas.

The story focuses on best friends Alix and Claire, who are sophomores enduring the typical challenges of growing up. They fret over boyfriends and fashion choices, ponder the meaning of love and friendship, and compete fiercely, racing to be the first to pass the various milestones that mark an evolving maturity. Once she'd finished the screenplay, Churi, an NYU Film School grad, shot it, ending up with a 20-minute short, which she imagined taking on the festival circuit. But then Churi had an epiphany that changed the direction of the project altogether. "I was on-line one day when I started thinking: If I'm going to get this film to a teenage audience, I should build a web site," she says. "I realized that teenagers don't go to festivals; they're on-line, and it just made much more sense, both in terms of the subject matter and the fact that the web lends itself to mixing video, audio, and text, to think about it as an interactive web site."

The next step? Churi had to teach herself some web design basics and map out the project conceptually. She used the structure of the high school itself as the interface, allowing visitors to investigate Alix and Claire's homeroom, as well as the restroom, lockers, the auditorium, and library. Viewers explore the different spaces, each of which adds another dimension to the project, either in continuing the thread of the story or providing a space for discussion. Users can enter the story at any point in the 17 sections, and they can opt to view video clips, hear voices, or read text. Users can also post messages and thereby respond to the project in a direct and personal way.

Letters from Homeroom (lettersfromhomeroom.com) raises serious issues while also enjoying a degree of admittedly hyperbolic adolescent angst. Its strength derives in part from the simplicity of its structure, combined with its attention to real world issues. Teenagers have responded to the site in droves, a fact that clearly pleases Churi. "There's an anonymity to the web that makes people a lot more open to things," she muses. "Teens are often isolated and long for some sort of connection. The web is really wonderful in that there is this opportunity to find these connections. It provides chances to meet other kids in a very nonjudgmental way." Churi notes that one unexpected drawback of the site's realism is the fact that some teens respond to the characters as though they're real people, and often ask difficult questions or seek advice for daunting problems. "In some cases I've asked the actresses to respond," she says. "They explain that they're playing a character, and then try to offer advice from their own point of view."

The website has garnered attention from USA Today, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. Since the site's launch in February 2000, it has received as many as 16,000 unique hits a day from all over the world, including Australia, Peru and the Netherlands.

In addition to creating an emotionally compelling forum for teens, Letters from Homeroom also serves as an inspiring model for what might be dubbed a spatialized narrative, meaning a story that has been mapped and reconceptualized across the spatial realm. As more and more filmmakers break out of the confines of the theater setting, Churi's site grows increasingly pertinent, not only as one of the first projects of its kind, but as one of the best.

Her next project, Forest Grove, is a narrative, feature film and website that will explore the architecture of tract housing by aligning them with the architecture of storytelling.

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Emerging Fields > Digital Arts / New Media | The Human Animal | History | New York | 2000