Alan Ng, We Have Your Kids, 8/10, same as Dune.

Parents occupy their school when a million dollar corruption endangers their kids. We Have Your Kids is an “amazing, grassroots, underdog, uphill battle. Intimidation, like The Irishman, a potentially nightmarish situation. Unchecked money and power have infected school districts across America.” 1600 schools are closed a year. The education industry profits $1.6 billion a year by forcing school closings. “Undeniably brave, Coe and Gilger dared to expose pervasive corruption at the top.” 

Schools are companies with owners and managers. The Owners are Banks, Insurance & Wall Street in the benefits & debt portion of the budget; they take (34%). The Managers are the five union corporations of the employees who consume  63.5% of the budget. Kids, Parents, taxpayers get indoctrinated into a colonial compliance get 2.5%. It’s not a school, it’s a colonial tax extraction franchise: round up the poor local kids into a cinderblock, sensory deprivation experiment for 12 years; bill the taxpayer whatever you please. 

Discomfort with the fetters state institutions have caused enrollment to be cut in half, test scores to decline corporate profit has doubled over the last 20 years. NYS schools employ armed, $100,000-a-year police to protect the taxers, intimidate taxpayers and spy on kids.  NY schools have double administrators at a cost of $500,000 a year as enrollment plumes. Military-grade facial-recognition cameras ($2,000,000) encircle most franchises. Cameras that spy on employees & kids. Sold as “security and safety”, these military investments act as corporate socialism for military contractors. 

There is no legitimate threats in schools. Kids in school are 40 times safer than on the street or at home even accounting for mass shootings. All the mass shootings had armed police and cameras. The White Christian armed males - America’s primary domestic terrorists are not surveilled, studied, or defunded. High criminal referral rates for “disorderly conduct” are a model school product.

Mr. Smith goes to the school board. A true crime financial noir of tax-profiteers, political deception, and corporate retaliation. Emmy-winning artist, Wayne Coe, in a Michael Moore-style performative exposé, investigates the billion-dollar education industry ransoming the custody of their kids. 

Have American schools gone the way of Congress, the Executive branch, and courts, where money runs all, and representatives can’t even pretend to represent the public? 

“The education industry is, among other things, a billion-dollar industry and a billion-dollar industry is more important than the life of a child,” James Baldwin. “We can take our kids off their buses. We can take them out of their schools.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

The genre is financial noir. I used animation to visualize the financial underworld. Dark as the taverns in Lang’s, M, the shadowy alleys of Ford’s, THE INFORMANT, and the ratty dives of FORCE OF EVIL. The explosive train motif reflects the industry's gravy train, grinding inexorably, remorselessly, disempowered kids.

Noir is traditionally a low-budget affair, under-lit and shot on the cheap. We became school flatfoots. For years this school board’s recorded nothing & kept no public records. Over three years I amassed the largest archive of public school meetings available. Students published a fantastic student poll & institutional critique of consolidation - which the administration never spoke of & hated. Time after time we walked public surveys. With the cinematic surveillance, we exposed their invisible, administrative criminality. Years of meetings would have vanished as well as a school — without the public’s story, no voice for the voiceless.  

The public narrative: student’s cries of indignation and endangerment are omitted from history by the school's $100,000 Communication Directors and $250,000 superintendents. The unionized school boards represent employees against the public installed as they are by the Union voting block. Over $6 million a year is raised by VOTECOPE, NYSUT’s Committee for Political Education for lobbying. The school gets 30 column inches of free front-page newspaper propaganda while the parents struggle to get a 400-word letter in the back opinion page. The public face a media blacked out.

“Noir” is a social critique of capitalist political incivility, upward mobility for the rich, and spiraling poverty for state school kids. School closings are legal, militarized school executions. Consolidation is a spiritual crime: killing poor kids’ education to turn a quick fifty million.

The plot is vigilante justice, Lang’s THE BIG HEAT, enraged parents go after the thugs who endanger their kids. Into their school lair plans are brewing to shutter America’s most acclaimed school. Administrator manipulation, lies, sadism, power, greed, corruption, and violence are demonstrative of social decay.  

No dow-eyed kids, dewey-eyed parents, preaching pedagogues, and upstanding board members in real American gangsters-admin. This is a True Crime.

Abandoned schools are a landscape of despair. THEY LIVE BY NIGHT: bleak, emotionally vacant wastelands. The board’s exposure in a tawdry library/board room is dehumanizing by intent; it’s an environment where cats devour mice and no one hears you die. Like Wells’s THE TRIAL, the Board of Education is a mockery of justice, deceivers not democrats.  

“Dad, do you know how long we spent on Indians in Chatham? One day. And two on the buffalo,” said my brilliant middle school daughter and native American. Mostly taught outside state schools, she graduated cum laud from Harvard. Parents, even of modest means can choose to protect their kids from state domination.