The idea behind the student-created film Western Divided began with an article in the Chicago Tribune headlined, “Chicago, America’s most segregated big city.” Now more than six months later and with a grant of $1,500 from Inspire Films, Weinberg junior Julian Zlatev and Medill senior Chris Gonzalez have created a film that will be the final event of Inspire’s 2010 Symposium on Social Issue Media Saturday.
“I come from Florida, so I didn’t have a great understanding of what makes up Chicago,” said Zlatev, the movie’s director. “But when I started exploring a little more I noticed there was diversity but at the same time it was very non-diverse within specific communities. I wanted to explore that aspect of the city.”
The film explores the diversity along Western Avenue, the longest street in Chicago.
“The original purpose was simply to show that there was a problem in Chicago with segregation and these are the facts and this is what you can do to fix it,” Zlatev said. “But once we found all these people and heard their stories, we wanted more to look at just what makes up our community and what is it about Western Avenue that [makes it] so diverse.”
One of Zlatev’s favorite parts of making the documentary was meeting Western Avenue’s residents, like a man from Iraq who used to be a country western singer and currently owns a magic shop.
“It was amazing seeing all these different people and hearing their stories,” Zlatev said.
Despite the documentary format of Western Divided, Zlatev said students should expect something more unconventional.
“We don’t really follow those rules that most documentaries do,” he said. “Hopefully it doesn’t throw people off guard… we step back and don’t take as much of a biased tone as most documentaries, we step back and let the viewers decide.”
“As long as they’re open to it and know that they will sort of not be given everything up front then I think people will really enjoy it,” Zlatev added.
Western Divided premieres at 8 p.m. Saturday, May 8, in the Helmerich Auditorium of Annie May Swift Hall.