Trash talk among teenagers usually draws glares and reprimands from parents, mentors and teachers. But a passel of industrious DC students – most from Wards 7 and 8 – figured out how to engage such language to draw adulation and applause from their elders.

What they did was pick up cameras to zero in on the rubbish, bacteria and other pollutants choking the beleaguered Anacostia River. “Lessons from the Waterfront: The Anacostia” premiered to family and friends April 23 during an evening Odyssey boat tour along the Washington Channel.

“We’re trying to tell a story – that this is where the trash goes when you throw it on the ground,” explains Ricardo Jackson, a junior at McKinley Technology High School. “It has been dirty too long, and it’s time to do something about it.”

The 40-minute documentary coordinated through Northwest, DC’s Multi-Media Training Institute offers a 600-year primer in anthropology, sociology and environmental science. It chronicles the Anacostia’s glorious history as a life force for the Nacotchtank Indians and a trade hotspot where tall ships once sailed when tobacco was in its heyday.

Eventually it forwards to an inglorious present, where human behavior has made the tidal waterway unfishable, unswimmable and in some segments, unboatable. The film’s audience gags upon hearing that outdated 19th-century engineering means rainfalls of more than one-half inch pour 2 billion gallons of raw sewage directly into the river annually. Since 1989, volunteers have pulled more than a million pounds of trash from the 8.4-mile river and its tributaries – a dumping ground for an estimated 20,000 tons of debris per year.

By questioning movers and shakers such as Mayor Adrian Fenty and PN Hoffman Chief Executive Officer Monty Hoffman, as well as environmentalists and everyday Anacostians, the students delve into the river’s possibilities. Ospreys are once again nesting near its banks, but can tree planting, invasive plant removal, sewer upgrades and wetland resuscitation efforts restore a severely impaired ecosystem? Will a new baseball park and other shiny developments displace the poor and transform the waterfront into a playground for the wealthy? Or will it be an inclusive future, as developers promise, where everybody has a seat at the table?

Robert Boone, president of the Anacostia Watershed Society, has devoted the last two decades to sprucing up this 176-square-mile watershed. His nonprofit conservation organization is one of MMTI’s numerous partners. Only recently has Boone noticed DC’s black residents taking more than a cursory interest in the river’s environmental health. And he’s overjoyed.

“These kids are teaching their parents,” a giddy Boone observed from the deck of the Odyssey. “It’s a wonderful sea change.”

Another collaborator, the Anacostia Waterfront Corp., suggested that MMTI tackle the river’s legacy in film form.

“It started as a simple project,” explains MMTI Executive Director Lyn Dyson, who organized the Odyssey tour as a fundraiser for his 25-year-old nonprofit. “Then, the kids expanded on the idea as they did more and more interviews.”

Before Joniqua Hutchinson joined her older sister, Rinita, at MMTI, her career aspirations included doctor, teacher and singer. Now the Jefferson Junior High School eighth-grader has added television producer and actor to the mix.

Asked what she wants viewers to learn from the film, Joniqua sums it up this way: “If you actually cared about the river, you would stop littering, take care of it yourself, and stop telling other people to do it instead.”

Many of the students have devoted their talents to previous MMTI productions. Its mission is empowering youth through entrepreneurship and video and computer technology. 

“Most of all it’s focus, focus, focus on what story you’re trying to tell with a picture,” Jackson, who studies broadcasting at McKinley, says about the art of capturing just-the-right image. “And with different angles of the same shot you get a different perspective.”

“You have to be peaceful with the camera so it can be peaceful with you,” chimes in his friend Cornell Lyons, a sophomore at Maya Angelou Public Charter School. “If you go out there thinking you won’t get the right shot, you won’t. You have to have the passion in your heart.”

Lyons, an aspiring musician, appreciates what the institute offers. He is savvy to the perception so many adults have of him and his friends – that they’re thugs more intrigued with drugs and crime than education and jobs.

“Mr. Dyson gave us an opportunity,” Lyons says. “He took the chance to come out here and do something with us.”

Lyons invited his uncle, Robert Nicholson, to the documentary’s debut. Nicholson, who has called Southeast, DC, home for 28 years, was amazed how much he absorbed about the river in his own backyard.

“I knew he was doing something good,” Nicholson said about his nephew’s diligence as he prepared to disembark from the Odyssey. “But I didn’t think it would be this good.”