South Philly Review

Five years ago, Ben Herold met a group of teenagers who changed his life. Although they're half his age -- he's now 32 -- they taught him twice as much about the inner workings of an urban public high school than he could have learned in his job as an education researcher.

Each teen was a rising sophomore participating in a young scholars program at Temple University. They were identified by their schools as students with college potential, but "none of the kids were all-stars that were going to make it [to college] no matter what," Herold, a resident of Broad and Ritner streets, said. "They were bright, talented kids doing everything asked of them."

Herold worked as a program evaluator at Temple and got to know dozens of students. Six in particular drove him to make life- and career-changing decisions.

"The reason these stood out was the types of stories they told -- they had obstacles they anticipated and they expressed what a lot of young people were saying but weren't able to express," he said.

Enlightened, Herold wanted to share what he saw in Steve, Fresh, Malikka, Macho, Shalisa and Kurtis. He decided to make the documentary "First Person," airing 7:30 tonight on WHYY-TV and screening in communities across the city, including Fels Community Center, 2407 Broad St., where Lisa Nutter will lead the post-screening discussion on the film. The South Philadelphia Branch of the Free Library, 1700 Broad St., also is showing the film, with doors opening at 6:30 p.m. and the film starting at 7:30.

"I really could not have known less about how to make a movie," Herold said, "but I met these young people who jumped out at me. Each had an uncommon level of candor and were willing to be honest about what they were experiencing and how they felt about it."

Herold spent a year in pre-production, raising money to make the film, hiring a crew of five to film, produce and edit the piece, which he directed and produced. He also spent a great deal of time getting to know the students and their families, readying them for the camera that would become a part of their lives and track their roads to college.

"I told them from the beginning, 'I'm going to be with you come hell or high water.' There were different paths each took, and we were there from the beginning to the end," Herold said, adding he still keeps in touch with the teens today. "There were a lot of high points -- graduation, proms, acceptance letters -- but there were low points -- [Kurtis] was incarcerated for murder, [Shalisa] got pregnant. We captured all of it. That's one of the things that makes this film special and remarkable; we're just with them through everything."

Filming spanned 28 months from the spring of their sophomore year in 2004 to fall '06, immediately following the class of '06 graduation.

Herold and his crew were at school, work and home with the teens, allowing them to each have a camera for their own video diaries that are used in the 90-minute film.

Although they were all in the same grade, the six went to four different high schools in the city: two were at Benjamin Franklin, one at Philadelphia High School for Girls, one at Murrell Dobbins and two at Kensington.

"I made a decision early on that I wanted to be personally invested in their lives and their personal struggles," Herold said. "I don't understand how you can be any other way [as a filmmaker]."

After close to two-and-a-half years, Herold and his crew had 250 hours of footage to sift through and make many decisions on what to incorporate into the final product. It took them a year to edit before it made its premiere at the 2008 Philadelphia Film Festival, where it received Best Documentary (Festival of Independents) and the SCION Award for Best First-Time Film Director.

Accolades aside, it's all about reaching out to as many audiences as possible, Herold said, and showing them what it's like to be an inner-city kid trying to get to college and what everyone can do to help them get there.

"We want to show the challenges low-income urban kids face. A lot of young people in the upper middle class [the path to college is] almost like an escalator. They're put on there at a very young age. Even when they screw up and stumble, there's a team of people who keep pushing those kids back on," Herold said. "These kids are forced to run up a down escalator with life throwing challenges in their way. As soon as they make a teenage mistake, they fall. You almost have to be perfect and that's a lot to ask of a 15-year-old."

Just as important is letting the teens tell their stories.

"It's been hard," Shalisa said in a video diary on www.firstpersondocumentary.org of killings in her neighborhood's schools. "It's hard for me to deal with these things simply because every day I gotta wake up and go to school and I'm supposed to be and feel safe there and [not have] to worry about whether or not I'm going to come home this afternoon."