'Boys' to men
'Baraka' walks joyfully through the adolescence and awakening in Kenya with four kids from Baltimore's mean streets.
By Michael Sragow
Sun Movie Critic
Originally published February 10, 2006
A

Overflowing with comedy and drama, The Boys of Baraka unfolds on the mean streets of Baltimore and in the wide-open spaces of Kenya. There its heroes face the crossroads of childhood and adolescence - or as these proud middle-schoolers would put it, boyhood and manhood.

This documentary provides eloquent and infuriating testimony to the failures of the Baltimore public school system. But the two-year program it's based on - sending a score of 12- and 13-year-old African-American boys to a boarding school named Baraka, in Kenya's East African wilderness - remains a sign of hope, even after the program disintegrates. And the movie is a sign of hope, too. It's unceasingly involving and entertaining.

The Boys of Baraka lets you walk across Kenya and Maryland inside the sneakers of four kids who demonstrate varying degrees of resourcefulness, foolishness and courage as they stumble toward maturity. For 84 minutes, you become children separated from family for the first time, finding new existential footing under the big skies of Kenya, confronted with exotic wildlife and, for urban Americans, the even more exotic beauty of black unity. And you remain these children as they return to homes marred by drugs and crime and all the soul-testing pressures of poverty in America.

For decades it's been an unacknowledged fact that female directors like Gillian Armstrong (High Tide, Little Women) catch unexpected shades of thought and feeling from male performers. In The Boys of Baraka, the same is true with documentary-makers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, who zero in on their male subjects with a clear-eyed, open-hearted intimacy. Their heroes are, first of all, boys - quick to show their muscles or proclaim their genius, and just as quick to succumb to unpredictable impulse.

Ewing and Grady know exactly where to position the camera in order to convey internal tension without narration and to capture the kids' point of view. When Richard visits his convict father and tells his dad that Baraka will keep him out of "a place like this, where I couldn't see my kids," the filmmakers frame parent and child in a close two-shot. The father smiles as if covering hurt while trying to display support. Richard says his piece ruefully, right on top of the camera, and suddenly seems old beyond his years.

The moviemakers dot their story with vignettes that take your breath away and others that pump the air back in. The Baraka School puts Richard and Romesh, his younger brother, along with Devon and Montrey, into an environment where they must cooperate without recourse to fighting. They link up to Nature and the natural order - and to common humanity and wisdom. The counselors and teachers discipline them but also make the regimen transparent so the reasons for it are comprehensible.

In the process, all the confusions and possibilities of pubescence spill out. Devon, a child preacher, talks of the good and evil that wrestle within him. Montrey vents his explosive temper and learns control. Romesh attempts to escape, then stays and makes the honor roll. Richard, who can't spell, discovers a penchant for poetry that the moviemakers appreciate even more than his teachers. Near the end of summer break, Richard looks down sadly at the Baltimore street-corner gang he's shunned, and says the summer days just "ran like rain."

In a stunning twist, the Baraka School closes because of African political tumult before these kids' second year. For some Baraka boys, it's crushing evidence of life's disappointments. For others, it's a prod to greater accomplishment. The Boys of Baraka is as open-ended and genuinely ambiguous as the best humanist features - a study of growing up in extremes that recalls Satyajit Ray's The Apu Trilogy and Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows.