Pahokee

An amazing portrayal of life in high school that pulls at your heartstrings while providing an intimately filmed view of life in rural America

"Pahokee" is a moving and inspiring story of four African-American and Hispanic students, as they ride the roller coaster of their senior year in high school, in a rural farming community. From football games, student council elections, parades and proms, to single parenthood, after school jobs, college acceptance letters and graduation speeches, Pahokee and her protagonists will have you laughing, crying and cheering for them to succeed. This is a documentary with heart and soul!

This film does a wonderful job of allowing its subjects to tell their own stories in an honest and unflinching way, depicting the humanity and struggles of a marginalized community in a way that builds compassion and understanding.

"The only film in competition from Sundance that doesn't have US distribution." -Patrick Bresnan (director)

When it comes to capturing moments in the daily lives of select people in a community during a key period of their teenage years, this is a great fly on the wall documentary. It shows a reasonably well-rounded view of lower-/working-class Afro and Latinx rural America. A view that one would find difficult to discover on the news.

Pahokee was interesting, racially relevant, and somewhat nostalgic. Kinda had me wanting to move to back to an Afro-American community/city.

(significantly easier to read on my blog)

Notable Things:

1) The contrast of student lives in school and adult lives in fields

2) Fashion photoshoot day

3) The drum off

4) How well the football games were presented, especially since I lack interest in the sport

5) Going from school to cheerleading to working at a "fried chicken store" on the same day

6) The consequences of having "hard working" parents

7) The Harvard recruiter

8) The Army recruiter

Side Notes:

There are two back-to-back moments during prom night that had me wondering if there was any tension between the two racial groups.

While this is the directors' debut film, they've made three short films about Pahokee.

This is a surprisingly difficult documentary to find a representative photo for. If you search for one, you'll primarily see Afro-Americans, Latinx-Americans, football, cheerleading, prom, and fashion, but nothing that I feel accurately represents it or the four main people as a group (like a photo of them all together). It just gets into too much for me to feel okay with limiting it to any of those one topics. Fortunately, the website had a photo that encompassed both racial groups and the city's youth celebrating what I assume to be Día de Muertos (Day of the Living).

The more I follow the film's Facebook page, the more I feel like this film is special. After I saw Pahokee at the 42nd Denver Film Festival in early November, it traveled to Brazil, Poland, New York City, Germany, France, Austin, Key West, Portugal, and China.

Statement: If you're the type of person to meet someone from the lower-/working-class who is Afro-/Latinx-American and immediately assume stereotypes about them, do yourself and society a favor by watching this documentary.

Minor Spoiler: The decision to capture the person keeping an eye out with a revolver alongside (who I assume to be) his peers squatting behind cars to avoid potential bullets and then dash over to the two mothers holding down three or four kids while someone repeatedly yells out "get down!", lay with them, and keep the camera focused on their shocked faces was just... excellent. Keep that camera person out of a warzone. Or don't. Might turn out to be another Marie Colvin from A Private War (2018).

About the Trailer:

Nevermind dat sweet transition 2/3rds through, it only starts kicking in the slight spoilers (à la ruining dem moments) at 01:16, so it's fairly safe to watch.

Disclosure:

I attended the director Q&A during the 42nd Denver Film Festival immediately after watching the documentary.

The most challenging aspect of *Pahokee* for the typical American moviegoer (me) is its lack of an agenda. We are taught from childhood to negotiate our way through life according to a patchwork of social, religious, and political narrative frameworks, and we expect our edification (ostensibly the mission of the documentary filmmaker), like our education and entertainment, to reinforce a point of view, even one that (as so often is the case) may be trite and threadbare. So it's somewhat jarring when *Pahokee*'s filmmakers, the married team of Patrick Bresnan and Ivete Lucas, present us with almost two hours of unobstructed (which is not to say unstructured) insight into the lives of four high school teenagers as they negotiate their way through the most important years of their own young lives. There are no interviews; there is no obtrusive soundtrack eliciting/soliciting emotion; there is no overt attempt to create dramatic tension or drama of any kind, really. The filmmakers make themselves so scarce that four teens raised on selfies are not tempted to play to the camera or to play-act at all, and instead we see their lives in a manner that seems as dispassionately rendered as a God's-eye view could be. Even phone-camera video interstitials from the teens reinforce the matter-of-factness of the film, instead of hijacking it into the realm of the CW teenage confessional or Family Channel docudrama.

What emerges is a revelation, because as the film progresses we experience these four lives as they are lived and our prejudices - I'm speaking of preconceived notions, not racial bias, although that shadow is always present, too - are quickly dismissed and our would-be sympathy becomes something closer to empathy. Pahokee is the second-poorest town in Florida, 57% African-American and 23% Latinx, but its inhabitants live their lives the same way Americans of all classes and ethnic backgrounds do. The teens in this film have the same concerns as kids in every high school in the nation: studying hard to get into colllege; being popular, playing sports, and yes, raising a child as a single parent. 100% typical American kids.

There is ample opportunity here for canned drama, if the filmmakers had been inclined in that direction. One of the four teens runs for the Pahokee equivalent of Homecoming Queen; one is a star on the football team that plays for the state championship (a championship that, even better for the potential melodramatist, becomes caught up in specious controversy); one is the daughter of Mexican immigrants studying hard to ensure her parents' sacrifice is repaid; one is the aforementioned single father who is also the leader of the marching band's drum line (his drum-off showdown with his counterpart on an opposing schools band is one of the film's best scenes). There is even a shooting at a park that spoils one of the events being documented. And yet, the filmmakers never opt for cheap narrative thrills, but instead maintain an even-tempered pace and delivery that unexpectedly only deepens our empathy for the subjects. There is no guile, but there is also no sentimentality, and the reward for viewers is a kind of insight into these four young lives that heavy-handed storytelling would not have allowed.