Laura Paglin’s new documentary about Cleveland is a knockout. Not only does Facing Forward celebrate the innovative charter school, Entrepreneurship Preparatory School, it dramatizes what shreds poor families in this broken city. By focusing on Tyree Stewart, an inner-city kid who joins E-Prep in seventh grade though he only has a fifth-grade education, it illuminates the ties between home and school, ties necessary but extraordinarily difficult to forge.
Co-produced by local music critic Duane Verh, with sound by Stephen Bellamy, Facing Forward suggests the way forward for Cleveland’s kids – not to mention the city itself –requires changing the culture.
One reason so much of Cleveland’s East Side is shattered is broken families. Tyree and his sister Tyla are brought up by their mother and grandmother; there is no man in the Stewart household. Tyree starts off mouthy, so E-Prep disciplines him. He responds to the tough love of the principal, Mr. Emerson, head teacher Mr. Stragland and the school disciplinarian, Ms. Joyner, who says she comes from the same place as Tyree. These people do good, incomprehensibly difficult work in a building at East 105th Street and St. Clair Avenue in Collinwood (E-Prep now is at East 36th Street and St. Clair, in the Tyler Building).
What’s most powerful about Paglin’s film, part of a growing series also involving movies about Coventry and the 2008 elections, is how deeply she goes into the topic. I can’t imagine what Tyree and Tyla’s mother, who got Tyree expelled two months before graduation, will feel when she sees this. It details how she hired a gang to beat Tyree up, prompting him to bring a knife to E-Prep, prompting the school to kick him out for weapons possession. That he told school officials of the knife didn’t absolve him.
The photography is in your face, the sound minimal, the edits seamless, the color true. But at bottom, this is all about voices: some struggling, many sassy, many increasingly proud, all distinctive. And about giving voice by providing the proper tools.
When Mrs. Stewart pulls her kids from E-Prep and puts them in a Cleveland public middle school, it doesn't work. The grandmother intervenes and gets Tyree back to where he thrives and belongs. “I was in Africa on a little vacation,” smartass Tyree, lovable and ambitious, tells his E-Prep buddies upon his return.
Paglin’s movie, at its generous core, is about trust, suggesting home and school must be of the same purpose, must bend toward the same arc, for kids to take over the world in a loving way. It’s heartening Tyree is maintaining a 3.5 GPA in a suburban high school. It’s sad he’s in foster care. It’s also safe.
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Reviews are scored on a four-star scale.
Facing Forward will show at 7:40 p.m. Wednesday, March 31 at the Cleveland International Film Festival. Key players from E-Prep will join its Film Forum.
On April 10th, 2011 @ 02:24:pm,
This CIFF Reel Review in OHIO AUTHORITY excites me, because what I saw on the screen agrees with what I read in the review. That doesn't always happen. Bravo, Carlo Wolff. Despite all odds, an at-risk youth who was strong-willed and unruly learned perseverance and self-discipline, as well as self-respect and respect for others. The fact that this young man is continuing to be successful today is a testimony to the power of a grandmother who believes in hispotential as well as teachers and school officials who treated him with respect and unyielding expectations. It will continue to serve Tyree well. Although it was a difficult lesson in tough love, it included enforcing boundaries, something often damaged or lacking in an urban child's psyche. He learned a better weapon for survival existed within himself. He is now able to make his own way in this world. Would that all Cleveland's children were so prepared for their future.