Without free speech people are just silent, faceless drones. That’s the message driving Shelbi Kepler’s film "Lost Expression," which took the second place slot in a national film contest this week.

Shelbi is a 17-year-old senior at Temecula Valley High School. Monday, she boarded an airliner to New York to receive the award – and the $500 cash prize – at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan.

Her film depicts a world in which the government – represented as men in black suits – suppresses free speech.

The film begins with a teenager arriving at a political rally. The teen gets out and joins the protesters with picket signs in their hands.

The film then moves on to show reenactments of real world events. One scene depicts the banning of "Plainsong," a book by Kent Haruf, from a school in Nevada.

Men in black suits wearing transparent masks with painted-on smiles confiscate the books from a group of students. Later, the film shows the students wearing the plastic masks.

Another scene depicts a boy being expelled from a private school for listening to rock music at home. When the boy arrives home, he is wearing the same plastic mask.

The film ends with men in black breaking up the protest and arresting some of the protesters. When the first teenager to appear in the film returns to her car she, too, is wearing a mask.

The movie lacks dialogue. The only audio is a strange, ambient musical track by post-rock group Sigur Rós.

The result is an eerily silent but highly communicative four-minute film.

"I wanted to make it creepy. I wanted the masks and a creepy feel," Shelbi said.

The masks represent the uniformity people attain when their freedom of speech is taken from them.

"I wanted something that would silence Advertisement

[ Chatton and Associates ] them but would also make them look the same," she said. "You take away freedom of speech and we all become the same."

Shelbi’s favorite book, George Orwell’s "1984," influenced her heavily. "The masks make the ideal citizen," she said.

The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) organized the fifth annual Youth Film Contest to challenge US students 18 and younger to craft a message about free speech for the next president.

"Young people are aware that they are often pawns in the censorship wars," Joan E. Bertin, NCAC’s executive director, stated in a press release. "Many have seen books, artwork and theater pieces challenged in their schools and communities."

Shelbi illustrated examples of real-life censorship affecting high schools students because she wanted her film to appeal to young people, she said in an interview last week.

"I want [high school students] to know what [freedoms] they need to demand," she said.

The value of free speech is important to impress upon people while they are young, said Brian Pickett, NCAC’s youth programs coordinator, said in an interview.

"With a presidential election predicting historically high youth turnout, the winning films demonstrate that young Americans clearly see how governmental policy affects their personal lives," Pickett stated in a press release.

Shelbi found out about the contest through an Internet service called Fastweb, which e-mails her information about scholarships regarding film studies.

The contest came at a good time because she was already thinking about making a film over the summer.

"I already wanted to make a summer project," she said. "I wanted to do a music video."

Shelbi put the entire film together in less than one month after finding out about the contest, she said.

NCAC is an alliance of 50 nonprofit organizations promoting free speech awareness.

To view "Lost Expression," visit www.ncac.org/yfen.