Synopsis
With her steel-tough, relentlessly downbeat cinema direct documentary The Perfect Life, filmmaker Sam Lee - a former schoolteacher at Manhattan's unconventional Neighborhood Storefront School - revisits her inner city pupils from that institution after a ten-year absence. Lee continually intercuts footage shot during her tenure at the school, in 1992 - when the then-second graders radiated optimism and childlike idealism - with the 2002 footage. Her return yields a sobering glimpse of the students, who...more