College often isn’t just about striving to achieve your dreams, but to determine what those dreams are.
That’s just one of the challenges facing the four Black MIT students profiled in “Brief Tender Light,” Arthur Musah’s heartfelt documentary screening at the Woods Hole Film Festival.
The students have traveled from various African countries to attend the prestigious, Cambridge-based university, so they must adapt to a different culture, with different values from their homelands, while separated from their families half a world away. Coming from predominantly black communities, they also must contend with various forms of racism that they encounter as minority students in America.
The students from “Brief Tender Light”: from left, Sante, Fidelis, Billy and Philip. (Courtesy of Woods Hole Film Festival)
Filmmaker Musah, making his feature-film debut, knows the situation well – because he’s lived it. From Ghana, he, too, attended MIT and, for better or worse, had to adapt to a different culture while determining his path in life. For this reason, rather than relegating himself to the role of observer, Musah also becomes a part of the story, with his experiences an essential part of his movie, which aired on the PBS series “POV” earlier this year.
The film traces the experiences of the four primary subjects from just before their freshman year, as they prepare to leave home for MIT, through their senior year and beyond. The students – Sante from Tanzania, Fidelis from Zimbabwe, Billy from Rwanda and Philip from Nigeria – all have different goals, but one thing they share in common: They want to contribute in some meaningful way to their countries. Meanwhile, they try to strike a balance between assimilating into American culture while maintaining their own cultural identities.
In attempting to capture all of this, Musah creates a moving – and, indeed, tender – portrait of young people struggling with insecurities and setbacks while pushing forward to make the most of their opportunities. In the process, we see them evolve into adults who continue, in inspiring ways, to pursue their dreams and fight the good fight.
It’s a privilege to get to know them. ***½ (out of four)
Woods Hole Film festival will show “Brief Tender Light” at 4 p.m. Tuesday, July 30, at Redfield Auditorium.
More festival information and tickets are available at www.woodsholefilmfestival.org.
** Click here for Tim Miller’s previous movie columns for Cape Cod Wave **
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Tim Miller, Movie Critic
Tim Miller is co-president of the Boston Society of Film Critics and a Tomatometer-approved critic. He teaches film and journalism at Cape Cod Community College in West Barnstable. You can contact Tim at [email protected] or follow him onTwitter @TimMillerCritic. Or you can ignore him completely.
