Task 10 Evaluation : Question 2 - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The main character in our opening scene, we decided would be a teenage girl who is gay. Harriet, who is our main character, has a timer on her wrist ticking down to when she meets her soulmate. We decided to make her soulmate a girl as well to represent sexuality in our opening scene. Stereotypically, in the romance genre, a couple would usually be heterosexual and so in our film we challenge the code and conventions of the romance genre.

Most films in the romance genre show heterosexual couples and receive good reception from the public and the critics for example The Notebook and Titanic. They also mostly represent couples who are no longer teenagers as it is thought teenagers cannot experience love as they over-exaggerate things. Our film challenges the convention that romances have to be heterosexual and between people older than 20.

We chose to make the couple in our film homosexual as opposed to heterosexual as we thought that as times were changing and there have been changes in the law to make gay marriage legal in all states of the USA and other countries around the world, the film would be more well received.

In our film, we represented homosexual relationships as something that can be open and shared with other people. At no point in our film does any of the characters try to hide their sexuality or push away any of their thoughts. Even though other sexuality's besides heterosexual are more respected and accepted now, there is still controversy when releasing a homosexual narrative. For example, Brokeback Mountain was often referred to as 'the gay cowboy movie' when in reality it is a story about forbidden love. We knew that if our film had been released worldwide it would have been a risk to have the two main characters as lesbians but we wanted to show their pairing in a way it is not usually shown.
We chose to represent sexuality and age in our film as it is something that we believed should be represented more in cinema, as more storylines should be inspired by people's voices who are most often unheard.