Study Guide Themes Archives: Youth

Rain

When her grandma dies, 14-year-old Rain is sent to live with her drug-addicted mother in the poverty-stricken ghettos of Nassau. The irony of disease, drug addictions, prostitution, and poverty—set against the tourist-filled island backdrop—is difficult to ignore as these women struggle to find an inner strength to overcome their seemingly inescapable destiny.

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Racing Dreams

Racing Dreams is an exhilarating and emotional documentary following a year in the life of three top go-kart racers as they compete for the national championship. Barely 13 years old, Anna, Josh, and Brandon—and their families—must find out if they truly have what it takes to make it to NASCAR.

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Public Enemy

Four past members of the Black Panther Party — playwright and former prisoner Jamal Joseph; renowned musician and record producer Nile Rodgers; law professor and lecturer Kathleen Cleaver; and founding party member Bobby Seale — share their personal memories and thoughts on the historic, militant civil rights group that caused a stir in America during the 1960s and ’70s. The subjects also reflect on the organization’s impact on contemporary American society.

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Lift

Lift, a penetrating film set in Boston dealing with the bonds between a mother and a daughter is part melodrama, part consumerist critique, part heist flick. Lift portrays an embittered mother-daughter relationship located within a circle of dysfunctional friends and associates who aspire to materialism they cannot afford.

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Forbidden Games

A timeless evocation of childhood innocence corrupted, René Clément’s Forbidden Games tells the story of a young girl orphaned by war and the farm boy she joins in a fantastical world of macabre play. At once mythical and heartbreakingly real, this unique film features astonishing performances by its child stars and was honored with a special foreign language film Academy Award in 1952.

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