A Girl like Me is a 2005 award-winning documentary

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 by Kiri Davis

Kiri Davis

Kiri Laurelle Davis is an African-American filmmaker based in New York City. Her first documentary, done while enrolled at Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, A Girl Like Me has received significant news coverage....

. The seven-minute documentary examines such things as the importance of color, hair and facial features for young African American women. It won the Diversity Award at the 6th Annual Media That Matters film festival in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

, and has received coverage on on various American media sources, such as CNN, ABC, NPR. The documentary has been shown on HBO and is available, in its entirety, on mediathatmattersfest.org. The documentary was made as part of Reel Works Teen Filmmaking.

Synopsis

The video begins with interviews with Kiri and her peers about how 'black' features did not conform to society's standards of beauty. The next section was a repeat of an experiment conducted by Kenneth Clark in the 1940s where African-American children were asked to choose between black or white dolls. In the original experiment(s) the majority of the children choose the white dolls. When Davis repeated the experiment 15 out of 21 children also choose the white dolls over the black, giving similar reasons as the original subjects, associating white with being "pretty" or "good" and black with "ugly" or "bad". The dolls used in the documentary were identical except for skin colour.

Awards

• The Diversity Award at the 6th Annual Media That Matters film festival
• The SILVERDOCS Audience Award for a Short Documentary.

Screenings

• Tribeca Film Festival
  Tribeca Film Festival
  The Tribeca Film Festival is a film festival founded in 2002 by Jane Rosenthal, Robert De Niro and Craig Hatkoff in a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the consequent loss of vitality in the TriBeCa neighborhood in Lower Manhattan.The mission of the festival...
  
  
• The 6th Annual Media That Matters.
• Silverdocs
  Silverdocs
  AFI-Discovery Channel Silverdocs Documentary Festival is an American international film festival created by the American Film Institute and Discovery Channel. It is held every year in Silver Spring, Maryland near Washington, D.C.. Started in 2003, the festival is held for eight days in June at...
  
  : AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival
• HBO

External links

• "Kiri Davis' Official Website"http://www.kiridavis.com
• Edney, Hazel Trice. "New 'Doll Test' Produces Ugly Results", Baltimore Times, August 16, 2006. http://www.btimes.com/News/article/article.asp?NewsID=10180&sID=3
• Johnson, L. A. (2006). Documenary, Studies Renew Debate about Skin Color's Impact. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Pittsburgh: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06360/748295-51.stm.
• A Girl Like Me, Entire documentary on mediathatmattersfest.org
• "A Girl Like Me", Media That Matters, Biography of Davis
• "A Girl Like Me", Discussion of the background of making the documentary
• "BLACK KIDS’ SELF IMAGE-NO PROGRESS" by Marian Wright Edelman http://www.minutemanmedia.org/EDELMAN%20021407.htm
• "A Girl Like Me", Good Morning, America, ABC, October 11, 2006.
• "African-American Images: The New Doll Test", Talk of the Nation, NPR, October 2, 2006. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6181729
• "A Girl Like Me" appears in RACE: Are we so different? a public education program developed by the American Anthropological Association.