SYNOPSIS
In Screw Your Courage, young African-Americans who’ve dropped out of high school try to get their lives back on track with an unusual project for their impoverished Oakland, CA neighborhood. After spending their days doing hard labor at minimum wage, they transform into bloody-handed kings and queens with a performance of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
The San Francisco Shakespeare Festival’s Midnight Shakespeare program teaches inner-city youth communication, performance, discipline, and teamwork through Shakespeare. This ten-week program tries to respond to the problems of violence and gang-related issues. It culminates with a performance of Shakespearean scenes and monologues, with a set and props built by the participants during the course. Upon completing the program they are given a $100 stipend.
Screw Your Courage follows the rehearsal process from two young persons’ point of view. Yusuf and Khalesa are both 21 years old. Yusuf (Macbeth) used to be a drug dealer but turned his life around for a safer future. Khalesa (Lady Macbeth) has two children from two different fathers and she is trying to fulfill her dream to become a clothes designer. Both of them dropped out of high school, but now they continue studying for their GED at the East Bay Conservation Corps.
The first act shows the newcomers’ initiation into Shakespeare’s world, the participants’ first meeting with their teachers and each other.
The second act builds up the conflict in Yusuf’s and Khalesa’s life, as well as in the play. The actors face the necessity of relying on each other and trusting each other, which is anything but easy when attendance at rehearsals is irregular and hardly anyone makes the effort to memorize his lines.
In the third act everything is still open and rather chaotic. The disaster seems to be around the corner. The actors – together with the viewers – have no clue whether the performance will happen at all. It’s only two weeks away, but some of the actors are still fighting with their texts. The Elizabethan English challenges their tongues – the film shows the hard tries and failures, but also the moments when they catch the rhythm and the flow of the words. The participants’ enthusiasm is fluctuating and the rehearsal process takes an unexpected turn.
In the last act things are getting back into order, but even a few days before the performance the outcome is dubious…
The film’s main characters find the things in their lives reflect the Shakespearean conflicts. Power fights, betrayal, vanity, violence, assassination, revenge, broken families, superstition and remorse are issues that establish Macbeth’s plot and characterize today’s life, too. “I’ll go back no more, I am afraid to think of what I have done,” says Macbeth together with Yusuf, who had changed his life for good and has no desire to return to his past.
“War-story” (Challenges during filmmaking)
Riding the emotional roller-coaster with Khalesa…
Learning that Yusuf is going to become a father…
Muttering the tongue-twisting Elizabethan lines with them during the final performance…
Fighting for Yusuf’s words in the editing room to make his story concise, shaving words and building sound bites without altering the meaning, cheering about gaining fractures of a second….
Coming from Hungary, fearing the possibility of being rejected by a group of hard-life African-American teenagers, finding them extremely accepting, friendly and open to my absolutely different background….
I enjoyed and coped with the challenge of diversity. Producing, shooting and editing Screw Your Courage introduced me to different aspects of life in America, appealing and engaging personalities among grinding and rough circumstances.
