A Most Beautiful Thing

Based on rowing team captain Arshay Cooper's self-published memoir, this documentary is powerful and informative. Director Mary Mazzio -- herself a former Olympic rower -- takes viewers back to Chicago's West Side in the late 1990s. Through the Manley High School crew team's personal stories, we come to understand how kids in underserved areas grow up in both an emotional and physical war zone, where many join gangs as a form of survival but still expect to die before their 18th birthday, and where the people who are expected to protect them aren't always capable because of their own trauma. Mazzio uses statistics and medical/psychological data to show the effects of generational trauma: anxiety, depression, and trouble learning.

The Manley team's story took a twist when two young, self-centered White guys (one is described as "borderline racist," and the other admits he was culturally insensitive) realized rowing crews were pretty much exclusively White and got the notion to raise money to develop a rowing program with kids from a high school in an underserved area. They naively (and condescendingly) thought that they could train novices into gold medalists in one year and nab some college scholarships. That doesn't happen -- in fact, the team only lasted for a year. But what does happen is its own marvel, one that couldn't be seen without the passage of time. The 1998 Manley team is its own success story, and through Mazzio's storytelling, it's offered as proof that team sports can help break the cycle of poverty and violence, possibly steering kids away from potential trouble. The positive outcomes and messages in this film are many -- but when the crew team members put the lessons they learned into action to fulfill their goals and move their community forward, those lessons become outright inspiring.