For Ahkeem

This is a timely and important documentary about individuals and a community struggling to survive. In one of For Ahkeem's more moving and poignant scenes, 17-year-old Daje Shelton and her boyfriend, Antonio, are hanging out by the Gateway Arch in their hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. Expecting their first child, they face the Mississippi River and talk about if they would live anyplace else besides St. Louis. Daje suggests Hawaii, to which Antonio jokingly responds about how he can't surf because he's black. The takeaway overall is both an incomprehensibility and awareness of living anyplace else but where they live, in the marginalized neighborhoods of north St. Louis. It reveals so much in mere minutes about the movie's overall themes of institutional racism and economic injustice as Daje, Antonio, and everyone else in the documentary struggle to keep their heads above water in a system clearly skewed against them in many ways. 

Classroom posters of Barack Obama on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine and faded murals of 2008 "Hope"-era Barack Obama on long-abandoned storefronts symbolize the maddening lack of progress in the racism that has been a part of America since its very inception. And as Daje attends funerals of peers who were killed on the streets, and Antonio must face the criminal justice system, Ahkeem himself becomes a kind of symbol. This is revealed as Daje tells her little baby that while he might be seen as cute to the world right now, the world will not be so kind in a matter of years.