From Sundance to Starz: ‘America to Me’ goes deep and wide on race, education (original) (raw)
“I frankly thought it would never come to pass,” Oak Park resident and Chicago-based documentary filmmaker Steve James told me Monday about his expansive 10-part nonfiction series “America to Me.” It’s an unusually revealing mosaic, depicting in heart-rending detail a full, teeming year in the lives of students, parents and educators in the Oak Park and River Forest High School community.
“Hoop Dreams,” James’ beloved 1994 documentary against which James will forever compete, funneled many stories through the subject of two young men and their basketball aspirations. “America to Me” flips the funnel upside down. Recently acquired by the Starz network for a fall bow, James’ latest addresses two immense stories — race and education in America — by way of dozens of memorable, interconnected subjects navigating their lives and an entire school year together.
“America to Me” made its Sundance Film Festival world premiere Monday evening in Park City, Utah, where three of the 10 episodes screened for the media and the public. Episodes 4 and 5 receive an airing Tuesday; the five completed episodes screen Thursday in a five-hour, 15-minute presentation. (I saw all five for an early look here in Chicago.)
Hours before Monday’s premiere, the series produced by Participant Media (“Spotlight,” “Lincoln,” “An Inconvenient Truth”) and Chicago’s Kartemquin Films announced the Starz deal. Participant Media documentary President Diane Weyermann, a Columbia College graduate, brokered her company’s backing of “America to Me.”
“It’s our first collaboration with Steve,” she said Monday. “But we’ve been looking to do something together for a long time.”
The idea was years in the making, and everything hinged on getting the right, free-range access to the school community. James’ own kids attended Oak Park and River Forest, the last one graduating in 2010. “My kids were in school there when I got the idea,” he said. It took years, he said, to secure permission from the school board for James and his three “story directors,” Kevin Shaw, Bing Lui and Rebecca Parrish, to be granted the access they needed.
Later this year I’ll write in greater detail about the remarkable, heartbreaking, inspiring real-life cast of characters James and company introduce to the world in “America to Me.” These include African-American, Asian-American, Latino, biracial and Anglo kids of astonishingly wide-ranging interests and pursuits. James and his collaborative team filmed hundreds of hours across the 2015-16 OPRF calendar year. The first five episodes take it up through winter break. I can’t wait to see the rest of it, and I take it as a good sign that James told me Monday: “In my view, the series gets stronger as it goes, and as more and more happens in these kids’ stories.”
There are some indelible portraits here, of struggling, striving, hopeful teenagers and of instructors and administrators up against obstacles they can see and hear, as well as more elusive matters of racial bias, ingrained prejudice, white privilege (“to name a phrase,” James said, “that only existed in academia and critical theory up until recently”) and opposing educational beliefs.
There are scenes of boys and girls getting ready for prom, including a brief, agitated conversation between two boys waiting for their dates as they sit on a front porch and rock, nervously, back and forth on a porch swing and a rocking chair. There is an awful lot here, and I may be wrong, but I think “America to Me” will end up doing a lot of good for a lot of people. The school should rest easy; they did the right thing granting James the access and space he needed.
“OPRF,” James told me, “like schools everywhere, has been struggling with issues of racial inequity and academic achievement gaps for decades. And they’ve been talking about these issues.” Change has come slowly, even as societal movements such as Black Lives Matter (very much on the kids’ minds when the 2015-16 school year begins) has accelerated the awareness of so many problems.
“The insight and the understanding these kids have,” he said, guided the end result. However the Sundance screenings go, “America to Me” — the title coming from the Langston Hughes poem — has a home at Starz for the fall.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
Originally Published: January 22, 2018 at 11:00 PM CST