Xenophobia has nothing to do with the color of people's skin or with their ethnic origin, but it certainly has to do with social categories as superior or inferior poor or rich, on the top or on the bottom. It is xenophobia that makes women, homosexuals, the disabled and the old people find themselves in exile in their own land.


 
A Film by Bertram Verhaag

Dokumentary | 93 Minutes

Over the past 20 years, Jane Elliott, a former teacher in the midwest USA, has committed herself to leading a fight against prejudice, ignorance and racism in society. She continues to practise the same philosophy which she began with her school class after Martin Luther King jun.'s death in 1968. Today her audience is much broader including teachers, students, firemen and even the complete staff of a bank. In her workshops she devides people on the basis of two arbitrary physical-properties – BLUE or BROWN EYES. She declares the latter to be better and more intelligent and grants them privileges, privileges she denies to the blue eyed,deemed to be worse, less intelligent and lower qualified.

Jane Elliot
Jane Elliot
 

For the first time, many white people become acquainted with the feeling of belonging to a condemned group which can never win. They experience the feeling of being discriminated against, in the same way that society today discriminates against women, people with a different skincolor or the disabled. In only 15 minutes, Jane Elliott manages to build up a realistic micro-cosmos of society today with all its phenomena and feelings. As already known from the ill reputed Milgram experiment, even participants who knew the "rules" are unable to remain uninvolved. What starts as a game turns into cruel reality which causes some participants' emotions to errupt with unforeseen intensity...

 


Director of photography: WALDEMAR HAUSCHILD Sound: ZOLTAN RAVASZ Editing: UWE KLIMMECK
Second Camera Unit: HANS-ALBRECHT LUSZNAT, GLENN EDDINS
Music composed and conducted by: WOLFGANG NEUMANN, FRANK LOEF Production manager: ARLON GILK
In cooperation with JANE ELLIOTT Written and directed by: BERTRAM VERHAAG
Production: DENKmal-Film GmbH in CoProduction with WDR, 3-SAT und BR



Festivals & Awards

Blue Eyed has won plenty of awards and was selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles as „one of the outstanding documentaries of the year 1996“...
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Press Reviews

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Trailer

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© 1996