This year’s Sun­dance show­cased a dif­fer­ent kind of high school movie

“A lot of peo­ple have told me: ​‘High school’s gonna be the best time of your life’,” quips one stu­dent iron­i­cal­ly in Deb­bie Lum’s doc­u­men­tary Try Hard­er!, which pre­miered at this year’s Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val. An empa­thet­ic look at the col­lege admis­sions process at high-achiev­ing Low­ell High School in San Fran­cis­co, the film is one of three doc­u­men­taries at the fes­ti­val to inves­ti­gate this often-spout­ed but rarely accu­rate the­o­ry, each with a very dif­fer­ent sto­ry to tell about the US edu­ca­tion system.

Low­ell stu­dents expect great­ness. So do their par­ents, whose sup­port­ive­ness often wavers between ​‘polite­ly pushy’ and ​‘trou­bling­ly con­trol­ling’ (the term ​“tiger mom” is used on more than one occa­sion). With over 50 per cent of its stu­dent pop­u­la­tion iden­ti­fy­ing as Asian-Amer­i­can, there is an under­cur­rent of micro-aggres­sive stereo­typ­ing of which the stu­dents are all too aware. The school’s rep­u­ta­tion for aca­d­e­m­ic excel­lence leads out­siders to label its stu­dents ​“robots” and ​“AP [Advanced Place­ment, a high­er lev­el of high school edu­ca­tion] machines”, rais­ing ques­tions about anti-Asian-Amer­i­can bias in the col­lege appli­ca­tion system.

Equal­ly upset­ting is the racism aimed at Rachael, a stu­dent with a Black moth­er and a white father, whose jour­ney to under­stand­ing her own racial iden­ti­ty is ham­pered by casu­al stereo­types about African-Amer­i­cans and edu­ca­tion – at one point she recalls a fel­low stu­dent say­ing, ​‘I thought Black peo­ple didn’t care about their grades’.

Try Hard­er! nails the feel­ing of oppres­sive, world-end­ing stress brought about by exams, which at that time in your life feel like The Most Impor­tant Thing In The World. Lum is a com­pas­sion­ate film­mak­er whose pres­ence often acts like a ther­a­peu­tic pres­sure valve, enabling the stu­dents to share their deeply inter­nalised anx­i­eties and insecurities.

In the same state (Cal­i­for­nia) but an alto­geth­er dif­fer­ent real­i­ty (2020 rather than 2019) is Peter Nicks’ Home­room, the third part of a tril­o­gy of films based around Oakland’s pub­lic insti­tu­tions. The Covid pan­dem­ic hangs over the first half of the film like a sword of Damo­cles, its dis­rup­tion inevitable but unfore­see­able. The obliv­i­ous stu­dents of Oak­land High School, how­ev­er, have an equal­ly vital focus: the defund­ing and dis­man­tling of the Oak­land Schools Police Depart­ment, a PD which oper­ates inside the district’s schools and caus­es undue dis­tress to its stu­dents (the vast major­i­ty of whom are non-white).

The star of the show is Denil­son Gari­bo, a Stu­dent Direc­tor on the district’s Board of Edu­ca­tion and a pas­sion­ate and elo­quent mouth­piece for the 36,000 stu­dents he rep­re­sents. His tenac­i­ty and his abil­i­ty to fos­ter an uplift­ing sense of com­mu­ni­ty spir­it, even in the wake of a bur­geon­ing pan­dem­ic, is awe-inspiring.

Nicks’ incor­po­ra­tion of the stu­dents’ social media footage into an oth­er­wise ver­ité-style doc­u­men­tary is seam­less and utter­ly inspired. These self-filmed moments of rehearsed Tik­Tok rou­tines, glow-up pho­to shoots and spon­ta­neous imma­tu­ri­ty add tex­ture and vibran­cy to the film, and visu­al­ly rhyme with the emo­tion­al cli­max of a Zoom grad­u­a­tion ceremony.

While Homeroom’s stu­dents aim to defund the police, those in Maisie Crow’s At the Ready are all for law and order. Filmed in El Paso, Texas – just 10 miles from the US-Mex­i­co bor­der – the film focus­es on Hori­zon High School, a spe­cial­ist school for Law Enforce­ment Edu­ca­tion. These teens, the major­i­ty of whom are Lat­inx, with par­ents either from or cur­rent­ly resid­ing in Mex­i­co, are train­ing to become the next gen­er­a­tion of Bor­der Patrol offi­cers. The polit­i­cal bent of this insti­tu­tion is at com­plete odds with the two LA schools; where they both have wall dis­plays of Angela Davis quotes, here we have the ​‘Thin Blue Line’ flag.

At the Ready’s cen­tral con­flict is the inter­nal tur­moil of stu­dents weigh­ing up a secure, well-paid job (some­thing all too rare in this area) with their eth­i­cal con­cerns about ICE and the Bor­der Patrol’s tac­tics. For some the solu­tion is abstrac­tion from real­i­ty, with the rehearsed drug raids and active shoot­er drills part of an adren­a­line-pump­ing game. For anoth­er stu­dent the ethics are far from a prob­lem: ​“If I was a cop I’d just beat the shit out of every­body.” But for oth­ers the cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance becomes irrec­on­cil­able, and a future in the force no longer an option.

The one thing that life for Low­ell, Oak­land and Hori­zon High School stu­dents has in com­mon is a lack of the inno­cence and sim­plic­i­ty typ­i­cal­ly (and naïve­ly) asso­ci­at­ed with school years. Whether they are reck­on­ing with racial injus­tice and advo­cat­ing for police reform, stew­ing under the pres­sure of a hyper-com­pet­i­tive col­lege appli­ca­tion sys­tem, or hav­ing to choose between a steady career or moral integri­ty, high school could well be the tough­est time of these stu­dents’ lives.