Institute History
Description
Chantal has plans. She’s going places. She’s on track to graduate early, go to college, become a doctor, and get out of the Brooklyn projects where she’s grown up. Life for Chantal swirls with teenage emotions — she is brash, bold, self-possessed, and irrepressibly spirited, traits that inevitably clash with the world around her. Whether it’s her feisty resistance to the whiteness of her educational curriculum or her confrontations with the wealthy white patrons of the upscale gourmet food store where she works, her complexity and energetic sense of purpose are balanced by a hazy self-awareness of adolescence.
Part of an exciting wave of young Black filmmakers whose work reshaped and redefined indie film in the early ’90s, Leslie Harris was one of the few Black women making films from her own perspective, a rarity even in independent cinema of the era.
Digitally restored from the original 16mm A/B negatives, and a new DCP created in collaboration between Sundance Institute, the Academy Film Archive, and UCLA Film & Television Archive. Thanks to Miramax and Paramount for permission to screen the film.