Wide water

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Movie
German title Wide water
Original title The water is wide
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 2006
length 94 minutes
Rod
Director John Kent Harrison
script Jonathan Estrin
production Richard Welsh
Brent Shields
music Jeff Beal
camera Kees Van Oostrum
cut Michael D. Ornstein
occupation

Far Waters is a 2006 American television movie . It is a remake of the 1974 film Conrack , which in turn is based on the autobiographical novel "Trennende Wasser" ( The Water Is Wide ) by the author Pat Conroy . Jeff Hephner plays the young Pat Conroy, an idealistic young teacher who takes his first job on an isolated island off Charleston , South Carolina .

action

Pat Conroy, an ambitious, slightly rebellious, idealistic teacher accepts the offer to teach a community class of black children for a year. The children all come from the impoverished fishing families of Yamacrew Island. The school is run by Miss Brown, whose learning goal is to enforce blind obedience to nonsensical rules. Conroy sets heaven and earth in motion to motivate and guide the students. However, when he achieved his first successes with students and parents, his contract was no longer renewed by the conservative administration.

Yamacraw Island is an island off the Atlantic coast of South Carolina, inhabited almost entirely by impoverished Afro-American fishermen and farmers, with a tiny schoolhouse for grades 1-8. The only white people on the island control the shop, the library (which is only open when someone wants a specific book), the post office and the ferry to the mainland. Now that the local school has been incorporated into the larger counties, the superintendent is trying to provide the island's children with an undefined “better education”, although he is more interested in adherence to rules and rigid chains of command.

Young Conroy finds the school in a sorry state. Its principal, Mrs. Brown, focuses on teaching her students manners above all else through beating and verbal humiliation. The students in grades 5 to 8 cannot write or read, do not know which country they live in and do not know the name of the ocean in which their island is located. They have no idea about math and their own history.

Despite turning headmistress Mrs. Brown, Assistant Superintendent Bennington, the local whites and Superintendent Piedmont against him, Conroy shows the students films (they have never seen before), reads them stories he connects to maps and listen to the children. He even manages to organize a trip to the mainland; for many children it is the first time they have left the island. As a result, students begin to develop and flourish, both personally and in their interest in teaching content. Conroy seems to have found a real task for his life. It soon becomes clear that the administration has no interest in providing real education to the students. Mrs. Brown's stability and compliance is preferred. In the end, Conroy's contract is no longer renewed. He stayed on the mainland, got married, took various other jobs and eventually became a writer.

criticism

"This well-humored new edition always remains predictable and irritates with a superfluous, obnoxious off-narrator."

Trivia

The fictional island of Yamacraw actually refers to Daufuskie Island in South Carolina, which is now a wealthy vacation spot.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wide water on TV Today
  2. ^ The Beaufort Gazette , May 12, 1996

Web links