“Have you ever been affected by the death of someone you didn’t know?”

That was the powerful opening line to a pitch that led to the 2022 Fall LCA cohort’s Documentary project. Life Camera Action! is Hollenbeck PAL’s 12-week Leadership and Media Skills program that consists of two projects: the documentary, where students work together to highlight stories in our community, and the individual film that teaches students to tell their own stories creatively. For the documentary, our students from ages 12 to 17 were taught about elevator pitches and then asked to come up with their pitch for a documentary topic and voted as a class. In the fall of 2022, the story chosen was the real-life experience of 12-year-old student Carmen Nunez, who was mere feet away from the scene of a tragedy that rocked the community.