Mad Hot Ballroom (2005)

            How do you get the attention of fifth graders in the New York inner city public schools?  Furthermore, how do you do this post 9/11 in the same metropolitan area where that attack took place?

            Sixty schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx chose to involve 6,000 kids in a ten-week ballroom dance training program that culminated in a contest with one winning school.  They learned swing, rumba, tango and the merengue, a popular Dominican and Haitian dance step.  This film documents that process as well as the final contests.

            This is no dry documentary record of events.  It's exciting, with tremendous highs for the winners and devastating lows for the losers.  Ten-year-old kids haven't yet learned to suppress their emotional reaction to events, so it's all there on the screen in a drama that keeps your attention for just short of two hours. 

            But the success of this film is not just the fresh ebullience of these youngsters.  It's also due to the professional cinematic and editing quality of this work that carries the viewer in a story arc from the initial embarrassment of boys and girls dancing with each other to their final competitions.  And it does this with an intimacy in these children's lives that connected me to each one so that I cared about them.  In this ten-week screenplay, I saw them develop self-confidence, respect and a personal etiquette as well as ability in couple dancing. 

            There were several other treats in this documentary, a credit to excellent camera work and sensitive editing.  As their dance training progressed and the contests began, a variety of scenes were cut into the film that gave us a candid kids-eye-view of the universe; what they thought about growing up, drugs, pregnancy, the opposite sex and their future.  The camera also gave us a feel of what it was like to be in New York, walk the streets and ride the trains.

            This film is classified as a documentary, but it's also good entertainment.

            Reviewed October 30, 2005                Copyright 2005 Charles T. Markee

            MPAA: Rated PG for some thematic elements.