Put The Camera On Me

Put the camera on me is a true-life chronicle of a group of kids growing up in the California suburbs in the 1980s. Told through the films by filmmaker Darren Stein between the ages of 7 and 15, the film offers an intimate peek into the power structure within a group of kids captured on film when the parents are away-the jealousy, cruelty, sexuality, innocence, and often perverse imagination seen through the eyes of a child auteur at the dawn of the video generation. These movies became such an integral part to life on the street, that kids would vie starring roles in the films, as well as the attention and approval of the filmmaker, creating an atmosphere of betrayal and backbiting, with the exhilarating heights and crushing lows of a mini studio system. Tackling sophisticated themes such as homosexuality, the Holocaust, nuclear war, child abuse and loneliness, Darren’s cinematic imagination was precocious as a child, but somehow still familiar to the childhood experience of us all.