Film Activists Are Taking Antiviolence on Location | The New York Times |

Ronald Merritt, a filmmaker, peered out at the group of 30 high school students who stood before him on a Lower East Side sidewalk.

“If y’all lost somebody to gun violence, raise your hand,” he said.

Nine students did so. Their stories poured out: the friend killed after a rowdy party; the relative singled out by a rival gang.

Mr. Merritt nodded. A video camera recorded the students’ faces then panned back to him.

“Think about it,” he said. “It could be your life next.”

A few years ago, Mr. Merritt, now 23, was an unlikely messenger for this particular message. A former drug dealer in Queens, he once carried guns and spent much of his time on street corners. He can count 36 friends and acquaintances lost to gun violence, the latest in a shootout early Sunday. The shooting of two close friends, he said, prompted him to change his life. He is now an antiviolence activist with the Beyond Bullets campaign, organized by the media arts group Downtown Community Television Center.

On Friday, the group’s bright blue bus, with a video screen mounted on the exterior, stopped in front of New Design High School to show documentaries produced by young filmmakers. The message, reinforced by speakers, was simple: stay away from guns, and think about the consequences of your actions.

For Diana Rodriguez, whose 18-year-old daughter, Samantha Guzman, was killed in the Bronx on Mother’s Day in 2006, speaking at such events is cathartic. Her daughter had been preparing for her high school graduation when a bullet intended for someone else fatally struck her. She was buried in her prom dress.

“You don’t have to pick up a gun,” Ms. Rodriguez, a subject of one of the videos, told the students. “There are other ways of solving your problems.”

Over the last 17 years, shootings in the city have fallen by 76 percent, according to police statistics. But pockets of violence persist.

Citywide, 448 shootings have been reported this year for the period ending May 16, up slightly from the previous year. Over the weekend, at least 10 people were shot, five fatally, in episodes in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx.

Mariah Carter, 18, a senior at New Design, wiped away tears after Ms. Rodriguez spoke. She had raised her hands moments before and told her classmates how her cousin and his girlfriend were shot as they walked home from a New Year’s Eve party in the Lower East Side in the first hours of 2009. Her cousin recovered, but his girlfriend died from her injuries weeks later.

“There’s a lot of gunshots around here,” Ms. Carter said in an interview. “I grew up around it.”

The inspiration for the campaign came from a 2004 film called “Bullets in the Hood: a Bed-Stuy Story,” produced by Terrence Fisher and Daniel Howard, participants in a youth training program at Downtown Community Television Center, said Tahnee Tangherlini, an organizer with Beyond Bullets.

Mr. Fisher was already at work on the documentary when a close friend, Timothy Stansbury Jr., was killed by a police officer on the roof of a housing project building in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, in 2004. Mr. Fisher was with Mr. Stansbury at the time of the shooting. Neither man was armed.

A grand jury declined to indict the police officer. The city later paid Mr. Stansbury’s family $2 million to settle a civil case.

Mr. Fisher’s documentary suddenly changed focus, weaving together commentary on gun violence with footage from the protests and memorials to Mr. Stansbury. The film received special recognition at the Sundance and Tribeca film festivals, as well as a New York Emmy.

Mr. Stansbury’s mother, Phyllis Clayburne Watson, cautioned the students not to interpret her story as a reason to be wary of the police.

“I don’t want you to look at it as, ‘I don’t want to trust the police,’ ” she said. “Because there’s always going to be a time when you are going to need them.”

Afterward, she sat in the shade on the school steps for a breather.

“I just hope they listen,” she said. “You never know; it might be the smallest piece of your message that reaches them.”