From Sundance: Student Leaders Reclaim the Microphone in ‘Homeroom’

Emmy-winning director Peter Nicks has been exploring the intersections of health, education, and criminal justice in the city of Oakland, California, for more than a decade. Over three films created in the past 10 years, he has chronicled the lives of the Oakland community as they relate to the public institutions intended to serve them, such as public hospitals, police departments, and public high schools.

His latest documentary “Homeroom,” which premiered on Jan. 29 at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, represents the culmination of a decades-long project. The third and final film in an award-winning trilogy — including 2012’s “The Waiting Room” about healthcare in a public Oakland hospital and 2017’s “The Force” about the violence and reform in the Oakland Police — “Homeroom” focuses on a group of high school seniors in the tumultuous school year ending in Spring 2020.

Nicks’s directorial input in “Homeroom” — like in the other installments of his Oakland trilogy — creates a movie that forwards politics of class, racial, and social justice without engaging with them directly. His cinéma vérité style means that his own biases are hidden behind a veil of fly-on-the-wall filmmaking, but his choice to follow activist students and include powerful conversations on race, impoverishment, and education reform presents a clear path for the film to unfold. By giving the students the microphone, Nicks clandestinely shows his endorsement for the activism they take up, painting them as inspiring (if imperfect) voices in America’s shifting political context.

The film follows the small group of students as they navigate a series of hurdles in their quest to become high school graduates. Some of the hurdles could have happened in any year: the rigor of college applications, the stress of a broken school system, and the instability that comes with some low-income living conditions. Other hurdles, like attending school virtually during both a global pandemic, were largely unimaginable before 2020.

Nicks’s love letter to the spirit of Oakland finds its strength in its subject matter: the young community leaders taking up the mantle to better their city and its institutions.

Taken at face value, Nicks’s characteristic cinéma vérité style can be seen as an honest depiction of normal school life for teenagers growing up in one of the most diverse cities in the U.S. — but the film is truly made extraordinary by the struggles Oakland High School’s students face and their perseverance in the face of back-to-back injustices. However, as one of the film’s main subjects, Dwayne Davis, said in a Q&A session following the film’s premiere, these issues of racism and broken institutions are things students across the country deal with and are not unique to those featured in the film.

“Homeroom” makes that distinction clear as well. Rather than filtering the students’ lives and interactions, their flaws and complexity come through. The film depicts humanizing, imperfect moments through the students’ social media posts and vulnerable conversations about failing a test or having an unstable home, for example. Nicks highlights their complexities with honest, lightly-edited scenes, breaking from a media narrative that has sought to prop up young people in the pandemic only as saintly martyrs of an unprecedented school year.

This depiction is also aided by Nicks’s fly-on-the-wall approach to documentary filmmaking. Through a mix of cinematic footage following the students in their day to day lives as highschoolers and archival footage pulled from video diaries, Snapchat stories, Instagram posts, and TikToks, Nicks shows the story not only through his own directorial eye but also through the eyes of the subjects themselves.

While the cinéma vérité style means that Nicks doesn’t employ an explicit editorial voice nor make any outright political statements, the scenes he chooses to focus on and the conversations he draws attention to — on a myriad of subjects ranging from student leader Denilson Garibo’s immigration status to the Black Panthers and systemic racism — help to center the film in much-needed context.

In one of the many classroom scenes, a student tells her teacher under her breath that “everything is political” when he reminds her that class discussions are supposed to remain apolitical. In the same vein, while Nicks’s approach attempts to remain outside of politics, merely reflecting what the director sees in front of him, the result is something intrinsically rooted in politics and institutions beyond the public school system.

If nothing else, the film is a necessary time capsule. A window into the radical and tumultuous year that was 2020, “Homeroom” is the story of a diverse community during a critical moment in its history that meaningfully centers the moment’s catalysts in the storytelling process.

— Staff writer Sofia Andrade can be reached at sofia.andrade@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter at @SofiaAndrade__.