The Boys of Baraka | DVD Review

Compared to all those feel-good movies of mediocre public schools saved by a genial professor, The Boys of Baraka is a welcome trip back to reality. As a perfect example of out-of-the-box attempt to save urban kids from an unavoidable destiny, good intentions crash and burn when faced with real life. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady are responsible for this poignant documentary. Their journalistic background explains the apparent absence of a point of view, allowing the facts speak for themselves loudly. The main topic certainly calls for emotional exploitation, of which we are mercifully spared.

The doc follows a group of twenty kids from Baltimore in social risk who agree to participate in an experimental program. The idea is to make them spend two years in Kenya, hoping to take the boys away from the streets, and hopefully giving them some perspective. The film focuses in three of the kids primordially: Richard, a boy with learning disabilities, yearns for a future far from the gangs that rule his neighborhood for him and his little brother; Devon, a self-assured kid who aspires to become a preacher; and Montrey, a dilettante whose aimlessness is his biggest obstacle. Far from achieve radical changes in the boys, the trip to Baraka makes clearer the specific needs of the minors, as well as their skills. In Montrey case, some math skills come up to light, while Richard problems turn up to be more serious than expected. In a brutal twist, the Baraka program is cancelled right in the middle due to unrest in the region, leaving the kids without school and mostly, heavily disappointed.

The cancellation could have been the documentary death sentence, but Ewing and Grady, turn it around to expose Baraka as another well meaning initiative operating as trial and error. The filmmakers lost the opportunity to put this event in context and operated a microcosmic level in circumstances the story cried for a wider vision.

The features are pertinent and somewhat make up for the lack of context the movie suffers. A short conversation with Bill Cosby is particularly illuminating. Cosby, whose controversial opinions on the ways of the African-American family have put him in the spotlight, deliver a massive dose of common sense. The comedian is particularly poignant on how political correctness and concepts as “once in a lifetime opportunity” are more damaging than helpful to get kids in social risk out of the streets and into a classroom.

In the director’s commentary, the sympathy for the subjects of the documentary somewhat concealed during the movie, finally surfaces. It becomes clear filmmaker Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady managed to squeeze everything they wanted to say and show in the movie, to the point their remarks are more redundant than illuminating.

As for the fate of the kids, it’s –according to the DVD update- quite up in the air. All the leads are, in different degrees, headed to a destiny away from the projects, but the possibility of failure is a clear and present danger.

The Boys of Baraka succeeds in breaking some stereotypes on kids living in the projects, particularly by introducing young men with the will, but not the means, to twist destiny’s arm.

Movie rating – 3

Disc Rating – 3