(MCS) — Mount Carmel School announced that all films in the award-winning “We Drank Our Tears” anthology series have been uploaded onto the school’s YouTube channel for use by educators and viewing by the general public.
The announcement comes after the films were featured at the 2023 Marianas History Conference and the “Saipan’s Land and Sea: Battle Scars & Sites of Resilience,” a residential educational program focused on World War II education and presented by Eastern Carolina University.
The films are accompanied by resources for history teachers, including a lesson plan and slide deck that aim to cultivate more agency among students in the active study of history. Using the framework of conflict in storytelling, teachers can have students study and engage in a film or a story in order to examine the role of agency among marginalized groups in history as well as agency in their own lives.
The writer and producer of the film series, Northern Marianas College President Galvin Deleon Guerrero, EdD, is excited that the school is sharing these resources. He said, “These films have empowered a whole new generation of storytellers to learn more about their history and tell these important stories of resiliency and hope.” All films in the series were made primarily with students from the school serving as cast and crew members.
As Deleon Guerrero noted, “Just as the original book was the work of young students chronicling the stories of their elders in print, these films are the work of young students chronicling the stories of our islands in film.”
All films in the series are adapted from “We Drank Our Tears,” a 2004 oral history of the civilian experience of World War II battles on Saipan and Tinian, published by Pacific STAR Young Writers Foundation. In 1944, some of the final battles of World War II were waged on the Pacific islands of Saipan and Tinian. 933 indigenous Chamorro and Refaluwasch civilians did not survive the battles. The book and the film series tell some of those stories.
For more information about the films or Mount Carmel School, visit www.mountcarmelsaipan.com/.
