THE BOYS OF BARAKA

Seventy-six percent of black males in Baltimore don't graduate from high school. The reality of this statistic is depicted and confronted in THE BOYS OF BARAKA. For those middle-class viewers intoxicated with class aspiration, it may be easy to forget the fight for survival being waged on the streets of Baltimore and other cities. This film comes as a powerful reminder--not an indictment, just a reminder.

This is HOOP DREAMS in a classroom. The most troubled and least likely to succeed boys are chosen from the public schools of Baltimore and given the opportunity to turn their lives around by attending the Baraka School in Kenya, East Africa--an experience designed to prepare them for high school in two years and life in the world thereafter. We meet four boys, Richard, Romesh, Devon and Montrey, whose lives we follow from passport issuance to summer vacation and to a challenging fork in the road.

What this film refuses to sugarcoat is that this program's transformative power is the only thing standing between these young men and drug dealing, addiction, academic failure or worse, and the boys know it. They endure homesickness, anger, fear and culture shock to shed their disruptive, misunderstood, traumatized, academically uninterested selves. The school teaches them about reconciliation and teamwork and introduces them to the achievers buried within each of them. But most importantly, it gives them hope. And some of them soar.

Michele R. Brown

Heidi Ewing has produced and directed a wide variety of documentaries for both US and European television networks. For Discovery Channel and Granada, Ewing produced and directed a film on the ancient origins of tribal and religious body modification. Her most recent directorial success was DISSIDENT, a film about the struggle of Havana-based dissident and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Oswaldo Paya. She is the co-founder of Loki Films.

A private investigator turned filmmaker, Rachel Grady has produced and directed a wide variety of documentaries for The Discovery Channel, the A & E Network and Britain's Channel 4. Grady also produced TX, an intense look at life inside drug rehabilitation. This eight part series (for VH1) follows ten young adults as they battle to get off alcohol, heroin, crack and pills. Grady is the co-founder of Loki Films.

Print Source:
Heidi Ewing, Loki Films
443 Greenwich Street Suite 5A
New York, NY 10013
Tel: 212.343.8900
Email: heidi@lokifilms.com

Saturday 6/18 at 5:00 p.m.

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