The tapeman

That's how it happened with Anderson St. Louis, who five years ago, at the age of 13, skipped his second Mirror Project filming session and was awakened one morning not too much later to find Arévalo standing in his Somerville living room with a video camera. Later that morning, without particularly meaning to do it, Anderson was sitting across from his 13-year-old cousin Patrick, filming.

Patrick, who demonstrated an early talent for talking, launched into a meandering monologue on the subject of his bedroom. It went, in part, something like this:

"This is my room. Say I'm talking to a girl. Come up, talk to her, watch some TV. You know, like, watch some Duck Tales and stuff. I'm a little boy, but I know how to treat a girl. So all you girls watching out there, you know what's up. You want to get with my cousin Anderson, I'll hook you up. You want my number, you come to me. You'll be seeing me around. I go to Powderhouse. It's all right, school's all right and everything, I got my boys all up in there, like Eddie, James. They're all up in my room. They got a lot of girls up in there too, they're chillin'. One of them goes with my cousin Anderson. My cousin Anderson likes her. I ain't gonna say her name, but I know she's watching. I know she knows. I ain't talking to nobody, because I don't like nobody. I ain't got nobody in mind. [Long pause] But you know this is the best room. Nobody can get with my room. 'Cause I got my sneakers up in here. I got my Genesis up in here. I got everything. I'm living large."

And so on. The edited film was a miracle of unselfconsciousness; there were no adult questions, and no adult presence, from beginning to end. There was just a 13-year-old's view of a 13-year-old's world. People who saw this film recognized it as something special; ultimately, Living Large was featured at the second International Video Olympiad in Copenhagen, and Anderson St. Louis and Patrick Prophete, who needed to be harassed into making the film, accompanied their work through Scandinavia.

Living Large succeeded precisely because of its lack of planning, but the philosophy behind it is quite deliberate. Arévalo has been testing it out at Somerville Community Access Television for six years, as his brainchild, the Mirror Project, has helped local kids produce upward of 90 short documentaries. Throughout that time -- mostly alone, sometimes scrambling for funds -- he has operated on the theory that the act of filming can change a child's life. And in the long run, he hopes, video self-documentary could become a fixture in the underserved neighborhoods where he has been working.

But first, it is necessary to track down the kids.

So here he is, cruising the Mystic Housing Project in his blue Honda, looking for 10-year-old Tuyen Pham, one of the eight kids who are supposed to be filming the stories of their lives this spring. Enlisted in the pursuit is Marissa, who was Tuyen's best friend until earlier in the day when she became friends with Candace, but who is prepared to reconcile.

"Where would I be if I was me," Marissa is saying to herself, vaguely, and when an adult suggests that she should instead focus on where she would be if she were Tuyen, she fixes that adult with a gaze of some contempt. "No," she says, "where I would be if I was me. Because we're looking for Tuyen, and Tuyen is thinking where would she be if she was me."

At some point during the course of the last six years, Arévalo has grown accustomed to child logic. He smiles and keeps driving.

Arévalo, 38, first appreciated his medium from across the great expanse of class. When he was a boy, in Bogotá, Colombia, he lived with his mother and four sisters in a house on the outskirts of the city, and he slept with a length of metal pipe under his bed in case he needed to defend his family against robbers. His family didn't have a television; that's one of the ways he realized he was poor. The other kids at school would hash over the latest episode of Bonanza; he'd hang around and memorize what they said about it. Then he'd have something to say when the next group of kids started talking about Bonanza.

He didn't see color television until his first night in America, in a motel in Florida, when he was 22. And it was five years later that he took control of the means of production. He was living in New York then, with a newly purchased Social Security number and the name that came with it (meet Fernando Parras!), waiting tables and taking classes at Hunter College. He bought a video camera that year, and began taping the cooks in his restaurant. He would throw parties and tape the first half of the party, and then, for the second half, the guests would sit around and watch the tape. He still has 500 hours of tape left over from that period, when filming was, he says, "a kind of addiction."

His idea was this: When you carry a video camera around long enough, people stop noticing that you're filming at all. The less self-conscious they became, the happier he was. And one day, on a visit with his four sisters back in Colombia, he gave the camera to his young nieces and nephews and let them film themselves while the grown-ups were talking in the next room. It was a revelation.

"I said, 'Okay, let's see what you did,' and when I saw it, I was shocked," Arévalo says. "Because I saw something in their behavior that I [hadn't] seen even though I'm pretty open with them. The way they interacted with each other. The girls were dancing. And they were hurting each other's feelings and they would start crying in front of the camera. I was just, like, 'Wow, this is so good.' "

And now, as a result of that moment, Arévalo is here by the Mystic River, watching Marissa film Tuyen, the camcorder balancing on her skinny shoulder. "My name is Tuyen Pham and I'm 10 years old," Tuyen says, three or four times. She doesn't know what to talk about, and keeps introducing herself, and the film keeps rolling. But Arévalo doesn't tell them what to do next. After an hour or so spent trying to keep the girls interested -- a task something like harnessing mosquitoes to farm machinery -- he finally decides to leave them alone in Tuyen's room with a camera. Then he sits down on a couch in the living room, in front of a row of studio shots of Tuyen's family, in the filtering light, and waits while the girls make their own movie.

For a filmmaker, this takes restraint -- will these girls end up filming long portions of Spice Girls videos showing on Tuyen's TV? It could happen. It has happened. From the room, certain of the Spice Girls' greatest hits drift out. But Arévalo doesn't tell the kids what to do. Aesthetic success is not really the point, he says.

"It's not a creation that's supposed to be sold," he explains. "I don't view myself as an artist. I view myself as an educator."

When an inexpensive portable video camera appeared on the market in the mid-1980s, forward-thinking youth workers recognized it almost immediately as a potential tool. In the Boston area alone, teen video programs have developed at Cambridge Community Television, at the YWCA Youth Voices Collaborative program, and through the Boston Film and Video Foundation. Laura Varul, who runs a similar program called Rise and Shine, in New York City, estimates the number of teachers using video nationwide is "in the thousands."

If Arévalo's approach is different, it's partly because of the emphasis on capturing only what the child wants to capture; he has high standards for noninterference. It's not just that he disapproves of reporters who come into the neighborhood for an afternoon to write about the lives of inner-city kids. (And their editors, too: "You know who should be the adviser to the reporter?" he says. "The person being written about.") He also has problems with documentary films made by well-meaning liberals like Steve James, who won nearly universal praise in 1994 when he released Hoop Dreams, a documentary that followed two talented basketball players through four years of high-school play and into college. On the face of it, the filmmaker was anything but casual about capturing his subjects' lives on film; he invested years in the project.

But Arévalo says Hoop Dreams is exploitive in its own way.

"I think Hoop Dreams is a documentary that captures a fragment of what some inner-city kids dream about and just pushed the families to talk about what the filmmakers wanted," he says. "The people who made Hoop Dreams influenced the lives of the kids in a negative way. I don't see where is the benefit for the kids. I don't see any. If anything, it stereotypes them."

The Mirror Project, as Arévalo designed it, imposes virtually nothing. During the four-month session, which meets on-site in the Mystic development three times a week, kids get instruction in filming and spend time editing with Arévalo. But it's central to his philosophy that they not be taught too much; he says children have a natural comfort with the machines and rely less on sophisticated editing than on fluid camera shots. And he doesn't coach them in what to talk about -- there are no scripts and no topics. That could have a distorting effect, he says.

"I can go to the kid and tell him, 'Tell me about violence,' and he might tell me stuff, but there is a difference, because that will be my agenda, and maybe in some cases he will make up something," he says. "We're not extracting fragments of people's lives."

For all Arévalo's talk about process, though, good reviews do make a difference, as Anderson St. Louis and Patrick Prophete can attest. The final element of any filmmaking experience is the connection with an audience -- and Mirror Project films usually do that, one way or another. Arévalo has a prodigious ability to get his kids' films into the public domain, at film festivals all over the country and on community-access cable in Somerville. A dozen standout films have won awards.

For some alumni, interacting with the audience turned out to be the most valuable experience of all. "I didn't think it was going to have the impact it did," says Natalia Velez, 20, who made her first Mirror Project film when she was 14. "We went to a lot of conferences and screenings, and all of a sudden everyone wanted to know what I thought.

"People would ask me questions about issues I never thought I would talk about in public," she adds. "The Mirror Project helped me tell people what I thought. I felt more or less entitled."

After six years of concentrated nonintervention, Arévalo is about ready to start working on his own films again -- he recently got funding from the private LEF Foundation to make a documentary about Marc Celestin, a 16-year-old high-school student who lives in the Mystic project.

"I will begin detaching little by little, so that in the end it will happen without me," he says. "It would be beautiful."

"There aren't many people in the world who have that particular talent, who are great producers and also have that level of perseverance," says Anne Marie Stein, executive director of the Boston Film and Video Foundation, who has twice selected Mirror Project films for inclusion in the New England Film and Video Festival. "It's not always easy."

Kids who have worked with Arévalo say he is the only thing that kept them in the program; despite his ad hoc, disorganized style -- or maybe because of it -- every one of them recalls Arévalo's campaigns to get their attention. At the Museum of Fine Arts last summer, when the project was celebrating its fifth anniversary, an auditorium full of lolling, blasé teenagers exploded into the kind of applause typically reserved for rock stars.

"He's the main reason I stayed with it," says Anderson St. Louis, who is now looking at colleges where he can major in communications. "He's a zany guy. He's the coolest teacher you'll ever meet. If he sees you on the street, he'll walk with you or ride with you wherever you're going."

Indeed, despite his pledges to have as little effect on the films as possible, a great deal of what keeps things going seems to be Arévalo's continual physical presence. When he began working on his first film at the Mystic projects two years ago, he remembers his subject's mother's reaction: " 'Who is this crazy guy with a camera? He's a crazy maniac.' I was a stranger in the community with a camera."

But all that has changed now, and he is allowed into private homes like a neighbor, or more than a neighbor. I am with him one afternoon when he is sitting in a girl's apartment watching her dance to selected cuts from, you guessed it, Spice World. She's at the age where her body seems to be growing too fast to keep track of, and she veers back and forth between shyness and outrageous extroversion.

The whole time, as she shimmys and twirls and slides down into splits in the living room, her mother is around the corner in the kitchen, with the shades drawn, sitting on the floor. But in the living room, where the camera is, the daughter keeps dancing.

Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.