The video was shared around the world. Viewed over a billion times.
It has been called the first ever viral video — a young teen swinging a golf ball retriever — pretending it was a lightsaber. The boy was branded the “Star Wars Kid.”
Originally from Trois-Rivières, Ghyslain Raza says he filmed the video to blow off steam and for his eyes only.
It was shared months later by some of his classmates.
“Not long after I started to figure out the scale at which the video was now circulating. Which was in a matter of days literally around the world,” he said.
Within weeks, Raza was the subject of hateful comments, taunts and insults from all over the world.
“There was the local harassment at school. There was the harassment on the internet and there was a form of media harassment as well. So it was everywhere,” he said.
Raza says local media tried to track him down by going to his home and showing up at his school. And then, international media came calling. From Jay Leno to BBC and Oprah. He declined to speak to them all.
“It wasn’t entirely clear in the first weeks, first months, if they wanted to laugh with me or laugh at me,” said Raza.
The 34-year-old says the attention changed the course of his life.
He was forced to change schools. He took the kids who leaked his video to court, eventually reaching a settlement. Then he went on to study law.
He wanted to completely distance himself from the video, until years later when he was approached by director Mathieu Fournier, with an idea to tell his story.
“The idea was to create something that would be useful, that would grapple with current issues and that would show why this story is still relevant today,” said Fournier.
And so, Star Wars Kid — The Rise of the Digital Shadow, was born. The documentary aims to tackle issues of consent, cyberbullying and the consequences of social media.
It will start airing on the National Film Board of Canada’s website Thursday.
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