COLUMBIA, Mo. — The recent world premiere of a sensationally effective Chicago documentary tore the roof clean off two different theaters at the 2022 True/False Film Festival.
“Let the Little Light Shine” is the title. And at True/False, the nation’s most beloved nonfiction cinema showcase, director Kevin Shaw’s film delivered the visceral impact of all six “Rocky” movies and a couple of “Creed” films put together.
It’s a rousing tribute to grassroots activism, charting a resourceful group of public school parents and students out-maneuvering their city’s attempt to convert National Teachers Academy, between the Near South Side and Chinatown, from a low-income, high-performing elementary school to a neighborhood high school. What the Chicago Public Schools called a “transition,” the NTA community saw as a racially motivated school closing, rushed through CPS and City Hall without meaningful community involvement.
Race was everything behind, and wrong with, the proposed NTA high school conversion, the film argues. The key subjects in Shaw’s documentary flesh out a story of two South Loop factions, fiercely separate and mutually wary.
Shaw and producer Rachel Dickson secured virtually unlimited access to NTA’s classrooms, activities and parents. The opening scene introduces the woman soon to become the public face of the school’s fight with City Hall: Elisabeth Greer, a longtime professor at Harold Washington College. We meet her, along with her fellow NTA protesters, outside the home of then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel who, in 2013, oversaw the closing of 49 public schools serving mostly low-income Black and brown families.
We meet NTA principal Isaac Castelaz, whose nine-year tenure (he stepped down from NTA last year) started badly but forced a self-reckoning in time for the fight of his educational career to date.
Two NTA students in particular cement the documentary’s emotional impact. Yaa (no last name given) is a sweet, withdrawn fifth grader when “Let the Little Light Shine” introduces her in delicately moving scenes with Castelaz. Taylor Wallace, whose spring 2018 eighth grade graduation is included in the narrative, steps into her predestined role as a student activist when the NTA community starts disrupting CPS meetings and taking to the streets.
John Jacoby is interviewed extensively; he’s affiliated with the nonprofit Prairie District Neighborhood Alliance. (South Loop real estate broker Tina Feldstein, the alliance president, is another key subject.) He speaks of how his daughter’s school, South Loop Elementary, not far from NTA, was “really terrible” 15-20 years ago. In Jacoby’s version of events, then-CPS head Arne Duncan “personally recruited” his family to enroll. That, in turn, encouraged “buy-in” from the increasingly white and well-off northeastern South Loop neighborhood.
“Once we were able to institute proper decorum” and proper “behavior and expectations,” Jacoby says, “the children took to it.” With those comments, strung together for maximum outrage in a minimum amount of screen time, audiences at both True/False screenings were practically shopping for pitchforks and torches.
Shaw worked as a segment director and cinematographer on filmmaker Steve James’ epic 10-part “America to Me,” a year in the life of Oak Park River Forest high school. There are times in “Let the Little Light Shine” when a larger, fuller treatment of this terrific story is warranted — not 10 episodes, necessarily, but more than 86 minutes. The Chinatown component of the NTA saga deserves more. Shaw, we learn at the end, was unsuccessful in getting CPS officials to talk, along with anyone, presumably, from South Loop Elementary. (Disclosure: My stepkids attended SLE for several years.)
There’s a huge upside, though, to the film as is. Once the NTA lawsuits commence, the movie flies to its irresistible conclusion. In earlier scenes, Shaw makes sure to vary the rhythm and keep our attention on human grace notes and nonverbal details. This is largely a movie about children listening to every new development in whatever room they’re in. And then acting on it.
At Friday’s True/False question-and-answer session, director Shaw said: “It was hard for me to penetrate the South Loop community.” On “America to Me,” Shaw filmed “mostly Black and brown families,” while his white collaborators filmed the white families. That approach made sense to him, and Shaw and Dickson worked in a similar way on “Let the Little Light Shine.”
“It’s hard to talk about race authentically with somebody you really don’t know,” the filmmaker acknowledged.
Now a high school senior with college offers from, among others, Mizzou, Wallace took a question from an audience member wondering if there was any way the NTA community could’ve managed a “win-win” for all South Loop factions.
Short answer: nope. “We felt like any change to our school at all was a loss,” she said. “We felt like were fully productive and functioning.”
The same win-win question came up Saturday at the second Q&A. An audience member wondered if NTA activists left any alternatives on the table. Greer, who appeared on both panels with Shaw, Dickson, Taylor and Castelaz, took a second, and then pointed out that the neighborhood has a high school, one plainly “underutilized”: Wendell Phillips Academy High School in Bronzeville.
“Is there a kumbaya moment to come together and fix this problem?” Greer asked. “Yes! Let the parents of South Loop Elementary and the parents of NTA Elementary get together and help Phillips become the amazing high school that we all deserve on the near South Side.”
She added that she doubts that could ever happen. “I personally cannot have a kumbaya moment with any of those people. We got hints as far back as 2015 that the whole neighborhood was ‘talking about our school,’ and we didn’t know anything about it. The machinery was already moving behind the scenes. (We heard) whispers to take over the school, to kick our students out, to change our culture and get rid of us.” The trust, she said, was broken at the starting gate.
When will Chicago get a look at Shaw’s True/False triumph? At Friday’s panel, the director mentioned a possible spring break screening in April at NTA. It’s certainly ripe for inclusion in the annual Lincoln Square Davis Theater Doc10 festival in May, and/or October’s Chicago International Film Festival. The national PBS “POV” documentary series has already picked it up for a December airing.
In the film, the ardently pro-public school philanthropist Chance the Rapper — who was forbidden, he says on camera, to visit NTA for a school event, even though CPS had solicited his visits to other schools in other circumstances — talks about the NTA students’ qualities of serious, effective civic engagement. He uses three words to describe them: “Focused. Organized. Militant.” They all apply to this electric charge of a movie.
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