The Prepubescent Awakening and Discovery in Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas' Amy George (2011)

Directed by Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas, Amy George (2011) is a low-budget film that primarily revolves around the theme of adolescent awakenings and configurations in the personage of its protagonist Jesse. Jesse’s Canadian household is middle class with nothing exciting and fun at all, let alone the pursuit of artistic aspirations—which is one keynote in the film. At school, Jesse has been given the assignment to take a self-portrait without it being too literal—meaning that something that reflects your inwardness, or your strong attachment to some object, activity, or plane of existence. Upon this, Jesse starts to aimlessly wander and explore in search of his self-portrait, and concurrently he experiences his sexual awakening.

A prepubescent thirteen-year-old Jesse, on par with his peers, is inquisitive toward the female body, especially the parts that fall under the jurisdiction of female privacy. This curiosity and concern are highlighted many times throughout the movie, as they seek and establish their identities as well as discover the other sex for the first time in their lives. His search for his identity is sometimes complicated like many others; at times he wishes to have been born as a ‘black, Filipino, gay, woman, or Jewish’ person. Moreover, Jesse starts reading a book for his school project titled “True Artist,” which delves into the subject of art and artist. In this book, the author claims that one cannot be a true artist if one has not made love to a woman, which probably deviates Jesse’s prepubescent development to other extents.

At one instance, Jesse climbs up a tree to picture a girl he knows—called Amy. He gets caught, but gets away with impunity, due to him forgetting to turn off the flash of the camera. After some time, the two get to meet together in serendipitous circumstances and talk more about what happened back then. In a subsequent hypnosis scene, after Amy is supposedly hypnotized to sleep, Jesse starts touching Amy’s body parts slowly and gently, as if he is discovering what lies ahead. He takes it further toward her vagina but shortly gives up, most likely due to his conscience since Jesse’s sexual awakening is rendered viable at the expense of Amy. The last part of the film afterwards is Jesse’s confrontation with his guilt and regret, thinking that what he had committed toward Amy’s sacredness was nothing short of a rape, unbeknownst to the severity of the self-accusation.

Amy George (2011) is a film that is slow-paced, gentle, and minimally infused with music and action. It reflects the struggles, explorations, and discoveries of the other sex, as well as one’s own personage through the eyes of thirteen-year-old Jesse.