After his Friday night lectures, Triton College professor Seth McClellan would go home and take a quick two-hour nap before driving for over eight hours to Kentucky for the weekend to work on his latest documentary film.
It was a grueling routine he stuck to for about five months in 2023 while teaching at the college in River Grove, but he’s proud of the result.
The documentary “Shiners: Voices from Owsley County,” focuses on a group of high school students living in one of the poorest counties in the country who are working to stage an original play. It’s currently streaming nationally on KET, Kentucky’s PBS station.
McClellan, an Oak Park resident who graduated from Governors State University in University Park, said he’s seen other documentary films where dysfunctional communities are “sensationalized,” but he takes a different approach.
Instead of focusing on the hardship that surrounds the students, such as the opioid epidemic, McClellan wanted to focus on how they navigate their environment.
“I’m not denying the really big problems, but the focus really is on how are people making their communities better in the midst of these problems,” he said. “So not trying to be as sensationalistic as possible or show the most extreme things as possible, backing away from ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’”
Shiners is the third film in a trilogy McClellan has made highlighting the voices of youth experiencing hardships.
“Little Wound’s Warriors: Voices from the Badlands” was released in 2017 and looks at Native American high school students overcoming obstacles in South Dakota. His 2021 documentary “Others Before Self: Voices from Tibetan Children’s Village” is about the Tibetan refugee community in the Indian Himalayas.
His films have won several awards, and he’s proud of the recognition and accomplishments, but the films themselves give him true pride. Being able to showcase honest and truthful films that make a difference is a wonderful feeling, he said.
Focusing on the stories of young people allows McClellan to tell stories through uncommon perspectives, he said.
“I think it’s really compelling to hear a youth perspective on these large problems,” he said. “It helps us understand how people try to engage with and see these things.”
He goes against the grain when it comes to classic narrative storytelling, he said. Instead of having hero and villain characters in stories, he wants his films to focus on building groups of people up while also addressing issues.
“What I think we have to do is change the way we think about storytelling as a community kind of thing, that there are multiple people involved and multiple interests,” he said. “I’m trying to tell stories about how groups of people are working together and not necessarily the classic hero villain dramatic structure.”
McClellan’s interest in connecting with communities is linked to his day job of being a mass communication instructor at Triton, where he’s been teaching for 18 years.
A high quality education is too expensive and often leaves students with overwhelming debt after graduation, he said, so he’s proud to be at a place where education is affordable.
“This place is here to directly serve and engage with the community and I think that’s really important for the future of our culture, our country, our world,” McClellan said.
In his production classes, he teaches students how to develop, plan, execute and edit ideas, the same way he does, while combining action, intellectual ideas with human emotions.
“I think the highest thing that we’re all called to as human beings is to deepen our understanding and appreciation of the humanity of others,” McClellan said. “We all are in this together and we’re all human beings. One of the best things we can do is tell our stories or tell other peoples stories so that we don’t see each other just as the villain or the other and instead see that we’re all pretty similar deep down. We all have the same basic drives and humanity and emotional lives, even though there are a lot of differences.”
Both in his teaching at Triton and in the filmmaking industry, he said he’s striving to make a difference in his communities.
“I don’t know exactly what my next thing is going to be … but I know for sure my next film will be about vulnerable communities trying to rise up,” he said.
chardy@chicagotribune.com
