The Boys of Baraka
| The Boys of Baraka | |
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| Directed by |
Heidi Ewing Rachel Grady |
| Produced by |
Heidi Ewing Rachel Grady |
| Starring | Devon Brown Richard Keyser |
| Music by | J.J. McGeehan |
| Cinematography |
Marco Franzoni Tony Hardmon |
| Edited by | Enat Sidi |
| Distributed by | ITVS |
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Release date
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Running time
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84 min. |
| Language | English |
The Boys of Baraka is a 2005 documentary film produced and directed by filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. Twenty at-risk boys from Baltimore attend the seventh and eighth grades at a boarding school in Kenya. The documentary follows them in Kenya and in Baltimore, before and after attending the Baraka School in Kenya. It also mentions that 61% of African Americans in Baltimore do not graduate from high school.
It premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in 2005 winning a Special Jury Prize. The film also won the Audience Award Best Feature Film at the 2005 Silverdocs Festival at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland. The film also won the Gold Hugo at The Chicago Film Festival, won the NAACP Image Award and was nominated for an Emmy.
The Boys of Baraka reveals the human faces of a tragic statistic – 61 percent of Baltimore's African-American boys fail to graduate from high school; 50 percent of them go straight on to jail. Behind these figures lies the grimmer realities of streets ruled by drug dealers, families fractured by addiction and prison and a public school system seemingly surrendered to uncontrolable chaos. As simply portrayed in Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's award-winning documentary, which has its national broadcast premiere on public television's POV, a generation of inner-city children faces dilemmas that would undo most adults. In this case, they are told early on that they face three stark "dress" options by their 18th birthdays – prison orange, a suit in a box, or a high school cap and gown.
The four young boys featured in The Boys of Baraka, despite individual talents and considerable personal charms, cannot escape the common fate expressed by those dress options. But fate, as documented in this film, comes to them with a remarkable and fickle twist – an experimental boarding school in rural Kenya.
The Boys of Baraka won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Independent or Foreign Film, as well as Best Documentary Awards at the Chicago and Newport film festivals, a special Jury Award at South by Southwest (SXSW), and Audience Awards at the Woodstock and SILVERDOCS film festivals.
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