The Boys of Baraka

The Boys of Baraka leaves you outraged in the way only the best documentaries can.

There are many tragedies and accomplishments here, without the engineered uplift afflicting any number of lesser documentaries.

Ewing and Grady could have done a better job filling in each boy's back story, as well as explaining exactly how Baraka started and what its agenda is. But the film is clearly a labor of love, portraying the lives of its subjects with tremendous intimacy and passion.

Gripping.

The Boys of Baraka is so rich that you wish there were more of it.

The kids absolutely win your heart, but there's something off-putting in the film's lazy juxtaposition of unexamined Negro dysfunction tropes (absent fathers, violent streets) against an idyllic Africa tended by white benevolence.

The Boys of Baraka's heart may be in the right place, but its portrait of poor Baltimore kids selected to attend boarding school in Kenya is rife with suspect perspectives.