First Person is an unobtrusive documentary investigation into the lives of six Philadelphia high school students, kids ‘struggling’ against the obstacles in front of and the odds against their realizations of a college education. Through video diary discussions, classroom captures, and football practice footage, the kids and their families attempt to make a case for continuing education in the midst of the inner city. I assume it was first time filmmaker Benjamin Herold’s intention to direct sympathy towards these kids, shed an interesting light on their stories, and unearth a new perspective on urban ambition, but his film could not possibly have made underprivileged Philadelphia youth look worse. Perhaps if he had put a little more care into the making of his movie, or if he had selected more deserving subjects, he would have come closer to extracting empathy from me.

High school seems to be a big joke in the Philadelphia Public School System, and (with respect to First Person) it seems the students are to blame for it. So much of this movie shows its six featured kids goofing their way through their Junior and Senior years in the most obnoxious ways possible. These aren’t kids who are serious and passionate about working for an education; these, instead, are children who think education should work entirely for them. One student so eloquently noted he disliked high school because he “don’t get no days off; it’s like slavery.” Though some of the other kids were less keen on verbalizing their dissent, they were just as effective in showing their distaste for chemistry class by cutting it in order to run the streets, shoot their friends, and make babies.

What astonished me about this group is that each and every one of them said that he or she wanted to go to college to get an ‘education.’ It is here that I must question what an education means to most folks. If I think about it, especially within the context of this movie, I have to come to the conclusion that education is merely a means to an end: more money, more stuff, and less time working for it. And if that is all education is to kids anywhere, it will always be a means to an end they’ll never reach.

Shouting out in class, defying teachers, fiddling around over the simplest senior year math lessons on the Pythagorean Theorem, all of this shows these kids going no where fast, of course. But First Person fails to unearth any kind of hope for lower class learning. It seems that the kids selected for this film don’t even know what the first person is; all but one of them spoke in unintelligible, double negative and slang ridden English that I am sure is not taught in even the most under funded public schools. One girl, who brought the movie to a resounding end with her baby shower, noted that she resented English class because writing essays meant that ‘paragraphs must be broke down a certain way.” I mean really – why follow these kids? Is there really any question as to whether or not college is in their cards?

My point here is that Philadelphia is certainly home to thousands of promising and extraordinarily bright minds from all races and ethnicities. When he said he would choose six top city students to follow through their later high school years, Herold should have felt morally obliged to uphold that promise. He told the audience at the 2008 Philadelphia Film Fest premier screening that he wanted to show what went wrong in the lives of these kids. But nothing ‘went wrong’ here; when you skip out on your chemistry class to have lunch at the mall, your educational future is already sort of in the pits. What’s worse, one featured student, Kurtis, who came from a loving and supportive home, decided to put a bullet in his friend’s head over a girl when he was sixteen years old. His mother noted, sadly, that, “Some things you just can’t fix.” If there’s anything we can learn from First Person, it should be that this is true for all students, whether they come from Philadelphia or Bel Air.

Liz Licorish
LizFlix@ElitesTV.com