Escuela

Director: Hannah Weyer
TRT: 76 min, 53 min

Escuela (School) is a documentary that follows Liliana Luis over the course of her freshman year in high school. Liliana is a Mexican-American teenager, rushing straight into the turbulence of puberty as she straddles her Mexican heritage and 21st century American culture. But as one of eight children in a migrant farm worker family, Liliana faces additional obstacles. During the school year her family moves three times, forcing her to start the arduous process of settling into classes, keeping up with school work and finding friends over and over again--a process she's experienced every school year, all her life. It's a game of catch-up that Liliana and her migrant peers are trapped in as their parents try to keep their families afloat through work on the agricultural circuit. As Liliana navigates the difficult terrains of high school, puberty, and migrant life, her story opens a revealing and personal lens through which to view the complex issues surrounding education for migrant students and the public school system in which they inhabit.