The Boys of Baraka
by Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady
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Actor: Darius Chambers, Devon Brown, Richard KeyserDirector: Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady
Brand: Image Entertainment
Cinematographer: Marco Franzoni
Cinematographer: Tony Hardmon
Producer: Heidi Ewing
Producer: Rachel Grady
Editor: Enat Sidi
Producer: Nikos Katsaounis
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 84 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-07-27
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: IMAGE/THINKFILMS
DVD Reviews of The Boys of Baraka
DVD Review: An Important Documentary That Should Have Slayed Bigger Dragons
Summary: 4 Stars
Heidi Ewing's The Boys of Baraka focuses on five struggling-urban-black-boys from Baltimore. The boys plan to spend two school years, minus the summer, at a rural boarding school in Kenya. (This "Baraka School" is the film's namesake). Unfortunately, the political situation in Kenya destabilizes and they are told that the school is shutting down at the end of the first summer. They have only spent one year there. The film follows the testimony of these boys and their families through this experience.
The Baraka School is not integrated with the Kenyan population. It appears to enroll several dozen urban black boys recruited from the Untied States. All of the administrators appear to be white and American. They have evolved a progressive curriculum for individualized learning and conflict resolution. Classroom instruction is weaved together with summer-camp-like community activities. By every indication, the boys make tremendous educational gains. They are able to phone home to the United States.
Yet there is also a benevolent and missionary subtext in the way that administrators interact with students. Good, liberal intentions can obscure the violence that "uplift by conversion" does to disempowered subjects. (Consider, for example, American Indian boarding schools). While the Baraka School seems to do a great deal of good, it also straddles this line. Some remarks seem trite, like when a white administrator asks "What do you think about living in a country where most of the people look like you?" The same administrator encourages an obese black student to climb the last ledge of Mt. Kenya by saying "I've got a chicken box up here for ya." I wasn't present for either moment so I suspend judgment. Suffice it to say that the camera captures tinges of paternalism and belittlement. It is enough to make one wonder.
I also wonder about the filmmaker's racial politics. Boys who speak in black vernacular selectively have their remarks captioned. Yet I have no trouble understanding what they say without captions. It raises the question: who are the captions for? When does English cross the line of becoming unintelligible on camera? Is that line racialized? My ears have squinted to make out the English of some European foreign diplomats but their words are not captioned by C-Span. What audience needs the "translated" Boys of Baraka? I also wonder if some of the candid street shots of poor black neighborhoods were edited to emphasize hostility, police presence, and anarchy.
There is a lot to be ambivalent about in The Boys of Baraka. On one hand, it superbly documents the foreclosed life possibilities of urban black pre-adolescents. It does this using the voices of children and their families. On the other hand, it gives no systemic critique of why these lives are foreclosed. The criminal justice system claims two boys' parents. But prison is framed as a future that these boys can avoid if only they receive the right education. While there is correlation between poor literacy and incarceration, this is not the whole story. The film never questions that the criminal justice system is humane and rational. Indeed, it never questions that poverty is rational. The poverty of Baltimore sprouts up out of nowhere, prime for Heidi Ewing to make a film about kids escaping it. This impression is misleading.
In fact, racialized drug laws feed a corporate prison economy. Legal and illegal bank redlining has encouraged urban poverty. The grass roots movement to divest in cities has present and historical perpetrators with names. Most black bodies add more to the Gross National Product sitting in prison than they do when employed with a high school diploma. The "Boys of Baraka" grow the economy *less* if they "succeed" in graduating from high school than if the government pays a corporation $40k/year to keep them locked up. These elephants-in-the-room are the film's albatross. In the language of Malcolm Gladwell, Heidi Ewing tries to "thinslice" the issue of black youth education. Unfortunately, if the viewer is educated about the complex problem of black poverty, the pretense of the film seems naïve at best.
The film gives an update on the subjects' lives nine months after not returning to Baraka. Two brothers have found themselves in an unhealthy home situation. Another boy's teacher tells him that while he may not become mayor of Baltimore, he should apply to a high school with an automotive trade program. "You can always work on cars and make some money. You gotta look at it like that." On the side she confesses stirringly: "I think if he makes it to 9th grade he'll be lucky. If he makes it to 10th grade, I'll be shocked. If he graduates from high school, I'll probably drop dead with surprise. It's like . . . there's no hope and there's nothing out there for him, other than a new jail they just built." Yet there are also more hopeful endings. One boy is pursuing a successful education as a preacher at what appears to be a storefront church. Another scored high on the state's standardized math test and enrolled in a gifted high-school.
Make no mistake, this is an important film. Heidi Ewing captures the perfect age where the subjects begin as boys and by the film's conclusion look like men. While there are structural causes, our urban centers are psychologically caustic spaces for native-born black youth. Somali immigrants who speak no English in fifth grade score higher on their ACTs by the end of high school than native-born blacks. Urban black youth who are bussed from city schools to the suburbs score the same as their white counterparts.
Bill Cosby blames black poverty on cultural pathology. He and others who read The Bell Curve and The Moynihan Report with their morning coffee ought to be challenged. I wish I could say The Boys of Baraka challenged them. It does not. Nonetheless, it enters a conversation that needs to be entered more often. It tells stories that need to be told. On those merits, the film is to be treasured.
Description of The Boys of Baraka
Don't miss the true coming-of-age story that follows a group of extraordinary 12-year-old boys from the most violent ghettos of Baltimore to an experimental boarding school 10,000 miles away in rural Kenya. An emotionally explosive journey shot over three years, the film zeroes in on a group of brave kids who are willing to cross the ocean to chase an opportunity - boys with a fierce determination to fight the label of "throw-away."This product is manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
If everyone in high government office saw The Boys of Baraka, who knows what kind of positive change it might inspire? From this remarkable documentary about hope and second chances, the message is clear: The poorest, most violent, undesirable neighborhoods in America are a breeding ground for hopelessness and despair, and there's a solution if only we'd give it a good fighting chance. The scene is Baltimore, Maryland, in 2002, where 76% of all African American boys living in the inner-city ghetto will never earn a high school diploma. As one adult tells the kids at a Baltimore school, they have three choices: jail, an early death, or graduating high school--and you know she's telling the cold, hard truth. That's when we learn of the Baraka School in Kenya, East Africa, where 20 African American boys (ages 12 and 13) are chosen each year to enter a transformative two-year course of schooling, away from their families in Baltimore. The purpose of the school, in part, is to demonstrate that the toxic environment of Baltimore, and its negative impact on the self-esteem of ghetto residents, can be reversed by removing these boys to Baraka, where a strict regimen of classes and responsibilities has an immediate, if not always permanent, beneficial effect.
We follow several boys on this fascinating journey toward growth and renewal. Devon is an aspiring preacher with musical talent; Montrey is a troublemaker with a bad attitude, who dreams of a career in science; brother Richard and Romesh are both accepted into Baraka, and despite setbacks both flourish in the program. Codirectors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady capture their gradual awakening to a new way of living and a new outlook on life, and then comes bad news: Due to security concerns and regional politics, the Baraka program is suspended, and the boys must return to the bleakness of Baltimore. Have they changed for good? Will they find a way to earn their diplomas and have hope for their futures? The Boys of Baraka offers no easy answers, but in showing us a glimmer of hope against all odds, the film gains depth and power with a conditional happy ending. Uncertainty remains, but so does a palpable sense of achievement and self-improvement that could, on a grander scale of government and societal support, lead to a positive revolution in our school system, which currently offers a depressing shortage of options for our most underprivileged citizens. Without forcing its uplifting message, this exceptional documentary offers proof of a better way, if only enough people would step up and support it. --Jeff Shannon
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