Like Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines’s Seventeen and Nanette Burstein’s American Teen before it, Peter Nicks’s Homeroom documents a group of high school students at a transitional time in their lives. The major difference between the three films is that Homeroom is quick to capture how the 2020 senior class of Oakland High School has a lot more on its mind than the typical adolescent anxieties. The school population consists largely of students of color, and in a time when systemic injustice has been brought to the fore, it’s only natural that the primary concern for these teens on the verge of adulthood is eliminating the controversial police presence that patrols their campus.
A narrative begins to take shape around Denilson Garibo, a student representative for the Oakland Unified School District, and his efforts to tackle this issue. But when he eloquently brings his concerns to the school board on behalf of the student body, underlining the need to redistribute the costly security funds into teachers’ wages and other school programs, he’s met with an infuriating level of apathy. The dispiriting but expected notion that no one listens to the students because they’re kids is a refrain that echoes through the documentary.
The disconnect between kids and adults is especially felt during an information session about the supposed value of police, with a nonplussed officer lecturing the students about the media’s involvement in making cops look worse than they are. But the kids immediately see through this ruse and one speaks up about the number of her friends who have PTSD due to experiences with law enforcement, a statement that lingers piercingly in the air unanswered.
Elsewhere, the teens are put on edge by the stream of videos of police brutality that flood their social media feeds. Most telling is a disturbingly vicarious moment where one student, while in class, watches the 2016 viral clip of the female South Carolina student whose desk was flipped backwards by a school resource officer before he dragged the girl out of her classroom.
While there’s a visceral shock to moments like this, it also betrays a somewhat constructed nature to Homeroom’s primary narrative thrust. In contrast to Patrick Bresnan and Ivete Lucas’s Pahokee, which took a far more observational approach to the lives of black and brown high school seniors from a disenfranchised Florida town, the backgrounds of the subjects in Homeroom can be vague. Our glimpses into their day-to-day activities are mostly limited to that which directly connects to the central storyline. There’s no question that the film has important things on its mind, but in neglecting the finer details of the students’ lives in favor of easy commentary, Nicks occasionally hampers the emotional resonance of his thesis.
Still, it’s hard to not be impressed by the political and civic engagement of Homeroom’s teen subjects, particularly Garibo’s steadfast determination to make his school a safer and warmer environment. When the Covid-19 pandemic hits, it casts an even longer shadow of doubt over an already uncertain future for the students of Oakland High. Instead of despairing, though, Nicks shows how their activism blossoms through social media and video chats, culminating in an ecstatic student-organized rally in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland that finally results in the abolition of the school’s police presence. Unlike the bleaker conclusions of The Waiting Room and The Force, Nicks’s two prior entries in his interconnected trilogy examining the failures of Oakland’s public institutions, Homeroom ends on an optimistic note, buoyantly proving that the solutions to the problems of today lie in the generations of tomorrow.
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