Check your local PBS listings to see when it re-airs incase you missed it. (the article was from yesterday so you'll have to check for the re-air, which PBS does w/ most films)
Trading in Baltimore Stoops for a Schoolhouse in Kenya
By SUSAN STEWART
Published: September 12, 2006
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/arts/television/12bara.html
Sometimes things have to go wrong for a documentary to go right.
“The Boys of Baraka,” an award-winning film that has its television debut on PBS’s “P.O.V.” series tonight, focuses on four African-American boys given a chance to trade the mean streets of Baltimore for two years of specialized education at the Baraka School in Kenya. It’s a conventional story of bootstraps and good intentions. But midway through the boys’ African odyssey, the program is disbanded because of terrorism concerns. That’s when the film becomes a more complicated tale: one of a dream derailed.
“Boys” opens with young men on Baltimore streets and stoops, playing cops with discomfiting intensity. It’s like a scene from “Homicide: Life on the Street,” only real. The documentary unfolds slowly, letting us get to know its subjects and their fractured but caring families. Richard and Romesh are brothers; their mother insists that both go to the Baraka School, or neither.
“I said, ‘Don’t make one a king and the other a killer,’ ” she says.
(With a five-to-one student-teacher ratio, the school, founded in 1996, was intended to give African-American boys from Baltimore a chance to learn in a different environment.)
Once the scene changes to Kenya, “Boys” resembles not a cop show but a nature special. The young men battle homesickness and, occasionally, one another as they hike, study and, it is hoped, prepare themselves not to be among the 61 percent of African-American boys in Baltimore who fail to graduate from high school.
When they return to the United States for a break before their second year at Baraka, they have clearly matured and mellowed. Richard, a 13-year-old who tests at a second-grade level in Kenya, has vowed to “keep on trying ’til the day I can’t try no more” and is showing promise. The charismatic Montrey, punished for fighting at Baraka, seems to have come around.
The boys are expecting another year of personalized education, after which they would likely be eligible for a Baltimore magnet school of their choosing. Instead, the ax falls.
“I thought it was going to be different but it’s not,” one shrugs in reaction to the bad news. How will he and his peers cope when thrown back into their local schools? How will their parents cope?
“Boys” is too sophisticated for heroes or villains, and portrays everybody with affection. But it’s hard not to pick favorites. Devon, 12 when the film begins, has a mother in jail. He also has a gift: preaching. Before Baraka, he leads church prayer services. At Baraka, he turns into a bit of a devil. “There is a side that tells me to do bad, and a side that tells me to do good,” he says. “I just don’t know which side to listen to.”
He listens to the right one; at the end of “Boys,” he is class president and still preaching. Others fare less well. The strength of “Boys” is that it shows their plight as honestly as it might have shown their triumph.
P.O.V.
The Boys of Baraka
On most PBS stations tonight (check local listings).
Trading in Baltimore Stoops for a Schoolhouse in Kenya
By SUSAN STEWART
Published: September 12, 2006
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/arts/television/12bara.html
Sometimes things have to go wrong for a documentary to go right.
“The Boys of Baraka,” an award-winning film that has its television debut on PBS’s “P.O.V.” series tonight, focuses on four African-American boys given a chance to trade the mean streets of Baltimore for two years of specialized education at the Baraka School in Kenya. It’s a conventional story of bootstraps and good intentions. But midway through the boys’ African odyssey, the program is disbanded because of terrorism concerns. That’s when the film becomes a more complicated tale: one of a dream derailed.
“Boys” opens with young men on Baltimore streets and stoops, playing cops with discomfiting intensity. It’s like a scene from “Homicide: Life on the Street,” only real. The documentary unfolds slowly, letting us get to know its subjects and their fractured but caring families. Richard and Romesh are brothers; their mother insists that both go to the Baraka School, or neither.
“I said, ‘Don’t make one a king and the other a killer,’ ” she says.
(With a five-to-one student-teacher ratio, the school, founded in 1996, was intended to give African-American boys from Baltimore a chance to learn in a different environment.)
Once the scene changes to Kenya, “Boys” resembles not a cop show but a nature special. The young men battle homesickness and, occasionally, one another as they hike, study and, it is hoped, prepare themselves not to be among the 61 percent of African-American boys in Baltimore who fail to graduate from high school.
When they return to the United States for a break before their second year at Baraka, they have clearly matured and mellowed. Richard, a 13-year-old who tests at a second-grade level in Kenya, has vowed to “keep on trying ’til the day I can’t try no more” and is showing promise. The charismatic Montrey, punished for fighting at Baraka, seems to have come around.
The boys are expecting another year of personalized education, after which they would likely be eligible for a Baltimore magnet school of their choosing. Instead, the ax falls.
“I thought it was going to be different but it’s not,” one shrugs in reaction to the bad news. How will he and his peers cope when thrown back into their local schools? How will their parents cope?
“Boys” is too sophisticated for heroes or villains, and portrays everybody with affection. But it’s hard not to pick favorites. Devon, 12 when the film begins, has a mother in jail. He also has a gift: preaching. Before Baraka, he leads church prayer services. At Baraka, he turns into a bit of a devil. “There is a side that tells me to do bad, and a side that tells me to do good,” he says. “I just don’t know which side to listen to.”
He listens to the right one; at the end of “Boys,” he is class president and still preaching. Others fare less well. The strength of “Boys” is that it shows their plight as honestly as it might have shown their triumph.
P.O.V.
The Boys of Baraka
On most PBS stations tonight (check local listings).