First Person

Steve prepares to graduate.

78% of low-income high school students expect to attend college. Fewer than half of them make it.

What happens to their dreams along the way?

First Person unfolds through the eyes of six promising inner city Philadelphia teens. The film opens on the first day of 11th grade, as each student embarks on the most important year of high school. Over 90 minutes, First Person takes viewers inside the challenges of pursuing college while navigating the responsibilities of family, the pressures of the streets, and the absurdity of a school system that fails to graduate almost half its students. As Steve and Macho struggle to let go of the familiar comforts of home, Fresh is overwhelmed by the weight of his family’s troubled past. As Shalisa and Malikka find their aspirations increasingly difficult to hold onto, Kurtis becomes entangled in the violence that surrounds him. In following these students’ divergent paths as they lead to community college and to the corner, to pending motherhood and to prison, First Person provides a deeply personal examination of how navigating the college pipeline leads to a dream deferred for far too many young people.

First Person was completed in January 2008. The First Person World Premiere & Benefit Concert presented by Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, LLP is scheduled for April 6, 2008 as part of the Philadelphia Film Festival. First Person is also scheduled for public television broadcast in Fall 2008.