February 18, 2010

A local teacher and some students will make their silver screen debut this weekend.

The movie World Peace, and Other Fourth Grade Achievements is premiering at the Paramount Theatre on Sunday.

Many of the fourth-grade elementary students are now seventh graders at Buford Middle School. They said they'll treasure the lessons they learned through that project for the rest of their lives.

It's taken three years for the film to make it to the marquee. The idea behind the movie, though, can be traced back much farther, to the beginning of John Hunter's teaching career at an honors high school in Richmond.

"I was tasked with building a curriculum for them that would really challenge them beyond book learning and lecture style," Hunter said.

Born was the World Peace Game, originally one piece of plywood evolving into a four-level Plexiglas structure. As the game grew, so did its popularity.

"He'd been doing it for a few years, and the board had been in the middle, and everybody, for the all the years, had been looking forward to the moment for so long," student David Cohn said.

The game involves letting students assume roles as world leaders, tasked with finding real-world solutions to real-world problems.

"I mean, I was like the poorest country," student Amelia Thompson said. "We didn't have any money at all, and I was really excited to get started. And I had no idea how hard it was going to be."

Through a mutual friend, Hunter teamed up with filmmaker Chris Farina.

"Within five minutes of being in his classroom, I thought there was a film there," Farina said. "And the kernel of it, John's a wonderful teacher, and there's a real beauty in the relationship between a good teacher and his students."

After weeks, each class eventually attained world peace.

"And after our friend got on the table and said that we had finished everything, that there was not a single crises left, we just went wild. It was great," Cohn said.

The game taught lessons for life.

"You should think about, before you criticize our leaders, it's really hard what they're doing," Thompson said. "It may sound easy to say it, but when you actually have to go and do it, it's really difficult.

Farina said he hopes the film goes well beyond Hunter's classroom and touches teachers from across the classroom and across the world.

The film screens Sunday, Feb. 21, at 6 p.m. For more information, visit the film's Web site.