Their story...Their words

Creativity and dedication help a Long Beach, California teacher, Erin Gruwell (played by Hilary Swank), succeed in changing the lives of high school students who are on the road to gang violence, jail, and death. Based on a true story and best-selling book The Freedom Writers Diary, Freedom Writers is both gripping and inspirational. It is guaranteed to have its audience on the edge of their seats and teary-eyed by the end.


The 1990s in Long Beach provided its disadvantaged high school students with three things: violence, intolerance, and hopelessness. As tensions build and racial wars are on the brink of taking over the city, Long Beach high school receives a new ninth-grade teacher, Erin Gruwell. In a display of naivety, Ms. Gruwell takes on the job of teaching “unteachable and at-risk” students. The obstacles she faces, according to the older and “more experienced” teachers, are impossible and innumerable; Margaret (Imelda Staunton) attempts to find any way of ruining the good Ms. Gruwell has done. She shows jealousy of the achievements of this young teacher and is angry with Gruwell’s impulsiveness.

Erin Gruwell’s dedication to her classroom silences her critics as she tears down the racial walls separating her students and infuses in them a hope for a bright and prosperous future. She provides for them examples of others who have overcome adversity and struggles like the ones they are facing through books such as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and meetings with survivors of the Holocaust. This amazing woman, while dealing with a husband (played by Patrick Dempsey) who is struggling with his own self-confidence crisis and the success of his wife, finds a way to teach her students to value their education and each other and in turn, the students slowly realize they are each other’s family.

This movie brings our attention back to the effects of racism in our country both in the past and present. It provides us with a hero from both of those times that rise above the racial boundaries and depict highly motivating and encouraging situations.

Freedom Writers is a true story of having faith in those others have given up on, an illustration of how far the encouragement and belief in others and oneself can go, and a testimony of those who have overcome racial boundaries, violence, and hopelessness. This is a movie for all to see; a movie that will inspire its audience to become heroes themselves.