A visit from your teenage self: The teacher who saves his students’ writings so they can read them 20 years later

Teenagers’ worries include: “All the girls are thinner than me,” “school is the most frustrating thing in the world,” or “I’m afraid of falling in love with a boy and having someone else fall in love with him.” These are real thoughts that hundreds of ninth grade students of Canadian professor Bruce Farrer (now 83 years old) wrote at the age of 14. From 1962 until last year, he asked his students to write a letter to their future selves in which they described their fears and aspirations. But the exercise did not remain a mere class assignment: 20 years after writing each of those texts, Farrer sent them one by one to their authors. Now the documentary The Farrer methodby Spanish director Esther Morente, which opens in theaters on August 30, shows how some of those teenagers, now adults, have faced their past selves.

“I offered my students the opportunity to reflect on their lives at 14 and think about the future, about how best to prepare to meet their goals. I told them: don’t just tell me what you did last weekend, or who your family members are. In 20 years you will still know who they are; tell me about your relationships with them, what irritates you, what you admire,” says Farrer. He does this by video call from his small farm in Qu’Appelle, in deep Canadawhere he spends his retirement years tending to his chickens and cows. “I have always enjoyed reading personal stories. I keep a diary that I started when I was 10, and the night before my wedding, 50 years ago, I wrote myself a letter that I reread on my 25th anniversary.”

The ten-page essays Farrer asked her students to write depict teenagers trying to fit into society, angry at everyone and everything, searching for an authentic self. The letters contain banal worries – “I wish I could marry a blonde girl who is 5’9″ – but also harsh everyday realities that they exorcised in their private texts: “I make hiding places in the woods to hide and get away from frustration”; or “My father has a problem with alcohol and disappears for days at a time.” Farrer comments on this age of physical and emotional change: “I think these are the most difficult years. Most of them tell me that when they read them they wanted to hug and comfort their teenage self and say: ‘It’s not so bad, you’re worth more than you think. ’”

The film The Farrer method brings together 13 of those students – selected from a 20-question interview, according to the Valencian director – who wrote the project in different years. Some break down reading parts of the letters and all compare their lives then with their lives now. Donna Rintoul says that reading her letter allowed her to focus on the things that are worthwhile, because she received it when she had just been diagnosed with a chronic illness. Nadine Kostek read it when her daughter was reaching the age she was when she wrote the essay. “What would you say to your 14-year-old self?” the director asks them from behind the camera. “Take your mother for a walk every day”, “go on that trip before life becomes too hard for you”, “don’t worry so much, everything will be fine”, they answer.

“I was very lucky to find these brave students, because when you talk about your own intimacy and expose your childhood wounds, it is a very vulnerable moment. Sharing them can help those who see it to embrace their own shadow,” she says. Esther Morente. The interviewees make clear the exercise of introspection that reading the epistles meant, although Farrer regrets that a great majority did not thank him for having sent them to them, considering the effort it cost him to keep them for so many years. At first he let his students keep the texts, but they lost them or ended up in the hands of the wrong people, so he decided that he would keep them.

“I had boxes and boxes of letters stored in the library, because I was also the school librarian. Nearing retirement, I started to worry about someone throwing all this stuff away, so I brought it home and stored it in the attic. It was hard to get to them, so they ended up in the dining room. My wife wasn’t too happy about it,” Farrer recalls. But the hardest part was finding the students 20 years later. Although Fort Qu’Appelle (where the school was located) is a small town, with just over 2,000 residents, many of the students moved away when they became adults. Facebook was his main ally, but he also turned to students’ parents and the phone book. Farrer says he returned more than 2,000.

In several cases – one of them is recorded in the documentary – the letters’ subjects had died when Farrer sent them. “These became more important, because for a few minutes the parents received a visit from a dead son or daughter. Sometimes, they also reached a spouse. It was hard. They could see all those dreams unfulfilled by an untimely death… and sometimes by suicide,” Farrer recalls.

Among the reactions of the now-adult protagonists, there are also some big disappointments. Sportsmen who thought they were going to become idols, the one who asks his future self to have “good abs” or the aspiring actress who said: “Maybe you’re reading this letter sitting in the Hollywood Hills.” “Maybe the feeling is one of disappointment or embarrassment, but they were 14 years old! They can’t feel ashamed of that,” says Farrer, always with long answers and a sharp thought that keeps him entertained: “I don’t plan on ever being bored.”

The film gives this unique character the air of a fairy-tale protagonist. The narrative is told in the first person and has a mystical air. Director Morente describes him like this after exchanging daily messages for five years: “As soon as I read his story, I told myself that it seemed like a fairy tale. I made sure, within our possibilities, that the film was like the story of a man lost in a village in Canada, with a responsibility that had a brutal impact on his students over time and now, hopefully, will have an impact on whoever sees it.”