High School
There are, no doubt, many schools in privileged parts of the world where one-to-one tuition and small-group seminars are the norm. Establishments where adolescents can offer intelligent thoughts on the different types of human love exemplified in King Lear, where feuding children have their problem judged by sympathetic mediators, and where the students are "made aware of their political citizenship, to give them the power to which they are entitled."
The twist is that this film is about New York's Harlem, a black ghetto with a huge drugs problem and crime rate, where the school in Central Park East has a world-wide reputation for its exceptional work.
As a pioneer of the fly-on-the-wall school of documentary, film-maker
Frederick Wiseman 's technique is simply to observe, to let each conversation and incident run its natural course. The result is a uniquely detailed picture of a remarkable school at work.
Series editor Andre Singer
A Zipporah production for BBCtv