This issue of 'bullying' is so much bigger and more ingrained into the psyches of virtually every human being than this documentary could possibly have addressed in its running time. However, they fell way shorter than necessary by picking subjects who are weak and have reason to be picked on --- not that they should be picked on & I'm not unsympathetic, but they don't make good case studies into the larger cultural norms that are the driving force behind the issue of bullying. If they'd wanted this documentary to have real impact, they needed to choose more relatable, realistic examples and shoot in bigger school districts where bullying is far more prevalent and life-changing. They also picked subjects with weak parents in weak towns and weak school districts who do very little to address this behavioral problem. Stopping the behavior is also far more involved than just having a rally here and there and showing pictures of deceased kids who died needlessly because they were not taught how to stand up for themselves -- I mean, seriously, if your child isn't mentally equipped to handle being bullied, do they have any real chance of surviving the real world? And that's the larger issue.... We need to look not just as the poor kids being bullied and just say "poor so-and-so" and force all efforts at changes this behavior onto other children who are no less equipped to handle life if they have to pick on someone weaker than themselves to get by. The documentary does nothing to address educating parents of these weak kids on what they need to do to make their own kids stronger and less likely to be bullied. It also doesn't address dealing with parents of bullies in any way. Change does not begin with rallies and all that goody-goody feel good for the moment crap. To achieve change, people have to be willing to put on the hip waders and slog through the crap that makes up human behavior and figure out why some are bullied and some are bullied. You cannot fix what you don't even understand. You also cannot fix what you are unwilling to punish. Bullying in schools should be treated like the crime it is -- in the adult world it's called harassment and there are laws against it. Anyway.... The film was a sad attempt at really showing the problem surrounding bullying from all aspects. There were no consequences for the bullies, the victims parents were all pretty pathetic.... Feeling sorry for these kids isn't going to help them -- they need to be educated and strengthened, not coddled and babied and taught that weakness should be a crutch in life. As that one kid pointed out, once he stood up for himself the bullies left him alone. That is the best medicine for this problem -- albeit not the only one. Granted, that is becoming more and more difficult in light of the gun problems in so many schools, too.

I think that the documentary was quite powerful, in my own opinion. The documentary didn't try to romanticize the idea of bullying or suicide but touched on the reality of it. The idea that school really cannot do anything is rather false and you can see that in this documentary. Also, they show the parents and how they cope as well. They follow a child and watch his daily routine as he gets bullied and tormented daily and how they take care of situations like that. They also show public meetings which were quite informative and helpful to see what the community thought as a whole instead of just the general people as themselves. I believe this documentary was made to help teach kids not to bully, and to show what it does to others, and how to guide kids who are being bullied to stand up and tell someone, because many societies and schools today are unsafe from this type of deal. Some teachers and children have yet to recognize it. I enjoyed this documentary for its informative reasons but the entire thing made me unhappy as a person to see this happening to children so young and that no one would do anything about it until someones life is at stake.

Really shocked at the things that I saw in the documentary. Incredible eye-opener of what is going on in these (mostly southern) schools. The documentary covers maybe 4-5 families, some with children getting bullied, some with now-deceased children who were bullied. The story unfolds lacing the stories throughout and to fruition.Not a happy movie, not really a "happy ending" to every story (some happy, others not at all).The focus of the documentary is on the kids, but there is a decent amount on the families and school administrations as well. It is here that the saddest things in the film lie. Everyone around these kids - the admins, their own parents... the way they treat these kids and the problems they face like... makes me mad. I left the movie frustrated, mad, wanting to sock some little bullies right in the throat. High score because I suppose that's the point.Loses some points for me for what I consider a weak close to the film, and it overexposed some stories at the expense of others - some of the others were interesting, I thought, but didn't get quite enough airtime.

Today kids are killing themselves and each other at an alarming rate. The one thing all these cases seem to have in common is bullying. There was bullying when I was a kid, but 3 PM meant the end of the trouble. We had the rest of the day, the weekend, and the summer to recover. The advent of social media and cell phones has made the respite obsolete, as now, bullies can torture their victims 24/7. Bully is an award winning documentary that looks at the problems of bullying and shows the effects it has on children's lives. What I like about this film is that it showed a whole group of students from different economic, social, and ethnic backgrounds. What I took away is that anyone who is even slightly different in anyway, could be a target. What I didn't like was the solutions the film offers. Their solution is to tell someone and to stand up for kids you see being bullied, but anyone who has been bullied will tell you that those are not good ideas. Often times telling someone will anger the bully and make it worse, and as for standing up for other kids, often times that makes someone who wasn't previous bullied, a target. I think the answer is two-fold, in that first, parents need to tell their kids, from a very earlier age, that being unique, different, and even weird are admirable qualities in a person. I also believe the schools need to be tougher, because honestly, does anyone really think that giving a bully detention, telling them they're not nice, and that their hurting other kids really does anything? I think bullies need a taste of their own medicine, to feel those powerful emotions for even for just one day. You can talk until you're blue in the face, but you don't really know what something is like until you've experienced it for yourself.