Teen Makes Film About Friend's Suicide

July 19, 2001 -- Lauren Noble didn't want her friend to become just another teen suicide statistic.

So Noble, a 19-year-old University of Florida-Coral Gables student, made a film called Silent Tears. It was inspired by one of her best friends, a boy who killed himself. The film, which premieres in her hometown Kansas City tonight, is not just an artistic achievement, but a potentially life-saving one.

A new study from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that knowing about a suicide may discourage other people from committing it. Nearly 5,000 teens and young adults committed suicide in 1998, according to CDCP.

Started as Catharsis

Noble actually completed the film in high school, when she was 18, after a male childhood friend committed suicide by taking an overdose. To her, the suicide came out of the blue, and she did not understand why he felt there was no other way out.

To sort out her confusion, Noble locked herself in her room for six to seven hours every day over three weeks, pouring out all of her thoughts and feelings onto the computer screen.

At first, Noble just wrote as a personal catharsis, with no plans of actually turning it into a public project.

But then, knowing that suicide was a taboo sort of topic, she wanted to bring it out into the open. At school, she did a stage performance of what she had written for her senior service project, and contacted a local video maker, Christopher Klinzman about just shooting the play.

Reliving the Feelings

Klinzman, the owner of Trans Digital Interface in Kansas City, and an aspiring director/producer, liked it and helped Noble turn it into a film. The film looks at teen suicide at a contemporary high school in the Midwest, and is one of the first digital feature films produced in the Midwest.

The whole process from writing to local premiere took about 18 months. The star of her film is a female character named Sarah Wilson, a high-school student who commits suicide because her peers reject her. The rest of the film shows how her classmates cope with the loss.

The hardest scene was the actual suicide, when Sarah overdoses on sleeping pills, because it required her to summon up all the painful feelings she had after her friend's suicide, Noble said.

Now, Noble says she hopes the film will touch people who knew her friend. And if he were watching she hopes he will look down and be proud that she is helping others realize they are not alone. Although Noble would love for the film to run in theaters, and she will submit it to festivals, her goal is to have it used as an educational resource for troubled teens.