Billy Marte has lived in the Bronx his whole life, and once upon a time maybe he thought he’d stay there for the rest of it.
“I can picture myself traveling to a lot of new places, meeting new people,” Marte says now, casting his eyes to the side. He gestures quietly, hands barely leaving his lap, and speaks with a kind of quiet thoughtfulness not typically found in twenty-year-old college freshmen.
Then again, Marte isn’t a typical college freshman. The first member of his family to attend college, Marte knows intimately how precious education can be, and what opportunities it can afford. He’s studied the college admissions system inside and out as part of the documentary he made with The Educational Video Center (EVC), a New York-based organization that is “dedicated to teaching documentary video as a means to develop the artistic, critical literacy, and career skills of young people while nurturing their idealism and commitment to social change.”
The documentary is called Making a Way, and it asks the same question that many high school graduates ask after taking off their cap and gown: where do I go from here? “Does every student have equal access and preparation to get into and succeed in college?” Marte asks, in summary of Making a Way’s core question. His tone is just a little dry, even as he keeps his words diplomatic: “A lot of people don’t believe that’s true.”
Making a Way is the result of Marte’s second stint with EVC. After an internship with them sparked his artistic interest, he followed up with the organization and sought to get more involved after a Media and Communications class piqued his interest in documentary work. “I didn’t care about the money anymore,” he admits, smiling. “This is where I wanted to be. I enjoy being here … the different things they make you do here—research, video editing, working on computers; the ideas you come up with, [they’re] ideas you care about, because they’re social issues. You realize that there are problems.”
It took Marte turning a critical-eyed camera on those problems and their communities to realize that he was part of them. “The issue we were focusing on is a statistic that I might be a part of,” he muses matter-of-factly. It’s hard to imagine: with trim, neat facial hair, a sharp button-down, and the type of quiet confidence that most people don’t cultivate until much later in life, he doesn’t exactly look the part.
But things have changed for Marte since he came to EVC and helped create Making a Way. “I could be one of the profiles that fits in with that story,” he notes. “I was a high school student, my grades weren’t that [good], nobody in my family completed high school or went to college … I was in a tough spot.”
Marte describes himself in those days as “stubborn and reckless.” But looking at himself with a documentarian’s eye changed that. As filming went on, Marte realized he didn’t want to be one of those statistics. He wanted to go to college, get a degree, travel—in other words, to succeed. “I realized that I wouldn’t want to be on camera, showing my story and failing.” His jaw sets, a little determined even now. “I wanted it to be a success story.”
That drive to succeed has served him well. Marte took to every aspect of documentary work: researching, editing, networking. The kind of critical and creative thinking required at EVC has carried over into college. He hasn’t limited himself in his course load, because above all his work with EVC taught him the importance of allowing experience to dictate the path: “I’m getting an Associate’s in Liberal Arts. I want to go to a different college and I want to make sure that anything I do ties together … career-wise, I’m still undecided … I’m looking forward to doing a lot of different things.”
EVC helped Marte find not only his drive—to go to school, to succeed—but also his curiosity and sense of self. He’s learned to never stop asking questions, whether it’s in the classroom or outside of it; as he puts it, documentary work helps “keep your mind fresh with new ideas all the time.”
One of the ways that Marte has learned to be happy is through the intellectual pursuit of those ideas until you’re satisfied. “Make sure you’re aware of yourself, your inner self,” he says, “because that’s where the happiness and joy is at … try to be happy. Look for different things that interest you—and go for it.” He claims to have been shy before, frustrated by an inability to fully communicate his ideas, but now speaks with fluid ease.“I can communicate better,” he says. “And … I’m always thinking about documentaries that I want to do. … I’m paying attention to where I’m living, and the community I’m living in.”
Marte has found that it’s hard to unsee injustice once you’ve seen it. EVC, with its heavy focus on civic engagement and social change, uses media to open that door. As Marte puts it, “EVC makes you want to help communities, and fight for what you want…If I see anything that looks like there’s no justice, I’ll want to stop it.”It’s not an easy task, but Marte knows that he has time to learn. “I feel like I’m going to learn so many things from here to four years from now,” he says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
He’s still asking himself the same question he posed in Making a Way—“Where do I go from here?”—but that’s only because “here,” is somewhere vastly different from where he was back then. Perhaps the goal isn’t ever to answer it fully, but to keep asking it from different places. To answer it again and again. In the immediate, Marte wants to get an Associate’s Degree in Liberal Arts. He wants to get involved with campus life. He wants to make his family proud. “There are a lot of opportunities,” he says, smiling. “You just have to look for them.”