American Promise

Impact Partners presents the U.S. theatrical premiere of AMERICAN PROMISE, by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, spanning 13 formative years in the lives of two young black boys, their son Idris and his best friend Seun, as they navigate an elite, performance-driven, ivy league New York City prep school in a universe still largely segregated by race, class and culture. Filmmakers Brewster and Stephenson, a Harvard and Stanford-trained psychiatrist and Columbia Law School graduate, respectively, are middle class African-American parents from the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. When they open their cameras onto the world of five-year-olds Idris and Seun, two talented boys both accepted into the prestigious Dalton School in kindergarten as part of the institution’s commitment to diversity, a sprawling and epic vérité essay on the education of young black males in America unfolds. While Idris grafts easily into social structure of his new school, Seun struggles to find his place in the scheme of things, and by high school ultimately transfers to the mostly black Benjamin Banneker Academy, a public high school in Brooklyn. Both boys face the challenges of their unique situation amidst the normal formidable pressures of growing up, including discipline from their parents, a mother’s diagnosis of cancer and the tragic death of a sibling. Chronicling the boys’ poignantly divergent — yet essentially interconnected — paths through high school graduation, this provocative and profoundly warm documentary presents complicated truths about societal coming of age on issues of race, class and opportunity in America today.