Sundance review: 'Homeroom' shows us high school life through COVID-19 and a social-justice movement, and how the students may have the answers we need

‘Homeroom’

★★★1/2

Appearing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Sunday, January 31. Running time: 90 minutes.

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The kids aren’t alright, but they may know more than the adults in “Homeroom,” a thoughtful and emotionally absorbing verité documentary inside an Oakland high school.

The student body of Oakland High School is about a third Black, a third Latino, and a third Haitian refugees, with only a handful of white kids. Director Peter Nicks takes his cameras into classrooms and after-school activities, capturing everything from rehearsals for a fall talent showcase to the meetings of the student government.

It’s in the student government area that Nicks finds the richest part of his narrative. He finds Denilson Garibo, a quietly intense boy who’s one of the two student representatives on the Oakland School District’s school board. In the fall, Garibo leads an effort to get the board to disband its in-house police force — which many Black and brown students see as intimidating, and a money drain that could be funding better education. When the effort fails in the fall, Garibo bravely dresses down the adults on the board, calling on the pain of his own experiences.

The film’s narrative takes a sharp turn out of necessity, when the COVID-19 pandemic forces California schools to close and switch to online learning. Between the pandemic and the protests that follow the death of George Floyd in Minnesota, the students get a different kind of education — and teach the grown-ups a few things, too.

With “Homeroom,” Nicks completes a trilogy of deeply embedded looks at Oakland institutions, following 2012’s “The Waiting Room,” which was set in a hospital, and 2017’s “The Force,” which went inside the Oakland Police Department. Here, as with those films, he lets his subjects do the talking, and provides enough room for their stories to play out naturally and eloquently.