Sundance 2021: Homeroom Review

Homeroom is the latest film directed by Peter Nicks, an award-winning cinematographer and documentarian known for his cinema vérité style. The film serves as the third and final film in his unofficial trilogy of documentaries that explore heath care, criminal justice and education in Oakland, California. However, this film is already far more prolific than his previous work, for one very specific reason that has little to do with the quality of the film itself. In September 2019, Nicks set out to document the graduating class of a high school in Oakland, California, capturing the students fight against injustice and how they view the changing world around them. When Nicks began filming, he had no idea that halfway through the filming process, the world would be dealing with a global pandemic, as well as an ongoing fight against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd – two major world events that perfectly aligned with the overall themes that he set out to explore in the first place. Nicks essentially struck gold and was given the opportunity to craft one of the most monumental documentaries to ever be released and unfortunately, he blew it.

That’s not to say that Homeroom is a weak documentary, as it is certainly a treat to watch the events of the past year unfold on screen through the eyes of the aforementioned graduating high school students (I graduated my undergrad this past year, so I can certainly relate in many respects). The film is fascinating in concept, but how Nicks tells this story and stitches the footage together, completely undermines the emotional turbulence that every teenager has felt during these trying times. Wanting to maintain his signature vératé style is one thing, but the film is so procedural that it leaves no room for any emotional attachment. The film treats its students more like statistics than fully realized people, as there is only one student featured throughout the film that we as an audience get to know on any sort of personal level, and even then his compelling story is not done any justice by the film’s cold presentation. Despite focusing on high school seniors, the film never truly delves into how they are the pandemic has affected them emotionally. It also never explores the challenges of adapting as a means to maintain the social experience of high school in some capacity. Nicks had so many angles to help enhance this story and ignored most of them, which is simply baffling.

One department where Homeroom does truly succeed is its exploration of the students’ fight against injustice. The school that Nicks purposely chose to document is largely populated by minorities. The local school board hired police officers to patrol the campus on a daily basis. Many of the students express throughout the film that this puts them in a deeply uncomfortable position. We are given the opportunity to see these students rise up and fight against the corrupt Oakland education system, that is clearly framing these policies as a form of racial discrimination. What begins as a small, but vocal group of students practicing activism, ends up becoming almost the entire student body population in response to the global fight against police brutality in June 2020. As a young person, its amazing to watch similarly-aged people fight against corrupt policies and in turn work towards making the world a better place.

This portion of the film is certainly inspiring, but its near-emotionally void presentation and its surface level exploration of COVID’s impact on high school students prevents Homeroom from being the groundbreaking documentary that it could have been. That being said, the film provides us a time capsule of the past year unfolding through the eyes of students which is certainly a unique experience that is worth checking out for that alone.