View from the ‘Inside'

Barbara Eder and Constanze Schumann are on their way to putting Brownsville on that map - in Central Europe.

The two Austrian filmmakers spent five months in Brownsville making "Inside America," a movie about the lives of Brownsville teenagers. Though fictionalized, the film is based on the year Eder spent as an exchange student at Hanna High School in 1994.

"Initially I had culture shock, but after awhile I started to like it," she said. "I told my friends in Austria about the experience and they said, ‘Oh my God, you have to make a film about this,"

More than ten years later, Eder spent five months, beginning in June 2007, shooting the film. It is now being edited, and is expected to premiere in both Brownsville and Austria this fall.

But the filming process had its share of problems. Because Eder and Schumann had limited budgets, they had to rely on volunteer actors, most of whom were students at Hanna.

"The people were so amazing," Schumann said. "More than three hundred people appeared in the film even though we couldn't pay any of them. They made the whole thing possible."

Luis de los Santos, 17, heard about the film's open auditions and decided to try out. Within weeks, he was one of "Inside America's" lead actors and production interns.

"I knew I wanted to be in film before, but I'd never been involved with the production process," said De Los Santos, a senior at Hanna. "I did things from the smallest jobs to the largest. I learned about lighting and casting. After the whole experience, I have a totally different understanding of how films are made."

De Los Santos had been interested in film before Schumann and Eder arrived in Brownsville, but his involvement in "Inside America" shaped his interest in the field. He was accepted to film school at New York University.

Input from actors like De Los Santos shaped the direction that "Inside America" eventually took. Teenage students candidly explained the details of their lives to Schumann and Eder. They discussed gang activity, relationships, and-a concept foreign to the filmmakers-the beer run.

"The beer run scene is the very first of the film," Schumann said, "and we adapted it thanks to the kids' input. In Austria we just hide the beer behind our sweaters, but in Brownsville they just grab it and run."

Although the scene adopted the documentarian aesthetic, Schumann and Eder filmed the scene with the permission of convenience store employees-and they were sure to pay for the beer.

In another staged scene, a gang fight breaks out in the halls of Hanna High School and is eventually quelled by campus police. The explosion of violence is a theatrical display. Real fists strike real bodies, and Eder's camera captures the physicality of the brawl. "The gangs that were fighting in the movie were really warring gangs," Schumann said.

In other scenes, the nuances of life in Brownsville are captured-from the mixture of languages and cultures to a depiction of the city's high rates of poverty and crime.

"I hope that viewers will be able to feel for these people," Eder said. "I'm not trying to shock people, but I expect that it might be shocking."

Eder and Schumann expect that the segments about the border fence will be most shocking to a European audience.

"People can't believe it here when I tell them," Eder said. "It reminds them of the Berlin Wall, which caused so many problems in our region and took so many years to tear down."