Last week, I was in Parkland, Florida, watching as students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School walked out of class, along with thousands of students across the country. They grew up in a cycle. They’d heard the echoes and seen the repetitions. But when gun violence came to them, they demanded a new timeline. They demanded that their voices be heard.

The idea behind this film, “Speaking Is Difficult,” which began back in 2015, is that speaking about gun violence, while difficult, is essential, and the only way to address our national shame. Underlying this project is the belief that America is caught in a negative feedback loop when it comes to gun violence. A congresswoman shot outside a supermarket, young children murdered in their classroom, moviegoers attacked in a theatre—none of these horrors was enough to get the country to address this epidemic. In fact, as the rate of mass shootings increased, responses seemed to grow more indifferent and unsurprised: shock, mourning, outrage, stasis, repeat. The film, reflecting the way these mass-shooting events echoed one another, was set to expand by adding footage from each new tragedy as it occurred.

After Las Vegas, the “worst mass shooting” in recent history, I felt hopeless. Even the brief conversation around bump stocks felt doomed from the start. The thought of updating the film seemed beyond daunting. Speaking wasn’t difficult; it was impossible.

But the pessimism that I felt so strongly after Vegas is being challenged in a way that I didn’t think possible, because of the activist students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas and elsewhere. Their voices, raised in defiant grief, calling out “Never Again,” have put a different frame around the latest version of the film, which begins in Parkland, and continues on to Sutherland Springs, and Las Vegas, and five other American cities forever changed by gun violence in the past eighteen months.

No one knows what’s next. There may be another iteration of this film a year from now, with a half-dozen or more cities newly affected by the terror of a mass-shooting event. We don’t know if we will be able to count on our representatives to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers and mentally ill people.

But the fight is on. And, instead of caving to the conventional wisdom that nothing will happen, there is a loud and growing call from America’s youth to break the silence.