A BOLD STEP
Director’s dual focus benefits documentary
If you think you know Step, think again. On its face, this documentary from first-time filmmaker Amanda Lipitz would seem to conform to the traditional youth-sports pattern: A team of high school girls from inner-city Baltimore are going to compete in a step-dancing competition. Will they win?
Instead, the film takes its own sidestep to focus on the girls’ post-secondary futures. Early on we learn that this team is part of the first graduating class of a new charter middle and high school, the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women. Its mandate is students graduate and go on to college. And some of them are going to need a lot of help.
This is a wise choice for both emotional and auditory reasons: 84 minutes of step dancing would have you sticking popcorn in your ears. And yet the director’s fly-on-the-wall approach leaves a lot of unanswered questions. What exactly happened to team leader Blessin last year to cause her grades to drop so precipitously?
We see a few dads and boyfriends in the background, and hear of financial difficulties, but it’s all kept a bit vague. A few quick question-and-answer chats could enlighten us, but Lipitz seems content to just observe.
Not that it diminishes the film’s emotional impact. Students, teachers, coaches and counsellors all shed a tear or two over the trials of getting accepted into college, and the even more important issue of figuring out how to pay for tuition.
And fear not: The tri-state step competition at Bowie State University in Maryland is not forgotten, even if its conclusion ranks of secondary importance to the college-application narrative. But when we see one of the graduates wearing a cap that reads Black Girl Power, well, it describes these young women’s step aspirations as well as their educational ones.