Teens wrestle with racism at Sundance Film Festival

PARK CITY, UTAH — Whether rich and privileged or struggling and living on the margins, one of the principal ways that teens cope with the difficulties of a life in the process of defining itself is . . . they don't. Instead they lash out in anger; they shut down when they should open up; they walk away when they should stay. Add in the issue of race, and the pot boils over, scalding hot.

In four new films, we see all this and more as a handful of Sundance filmmakers look at the life of contemporary teens in the U.S. through the prism of the high school experience and race. Using documentary and dramatic narratives, plumbing difficult and distinctive stories, the world the filmmakers give us is at once shadowed by the problems of the past and surprisingly saturated by hope for a better day. That is, of course, if you agree with the premise that a better day includes setting aside our racial differences, and as becomes apparent in the cinematic tutorial at Sundance, we are a long way from consensus on that front.

It was impossible to watch these films -- from the powerful cinematic expression of "Push" to the incisive documentary storytelling of "Prom Night in Mississippi" -- over the last few days without all the emotion of the inauguration of the country's first African American president vibrating in the air around them. Barack Obama's name and his mantra of change were often invoked as the films were introduced, providing an inescapable layer of context. If you are in the camp of those who believe that film more often reflects rather than predicts social crosscurrents -- and I am -- the voices coming out of here suggest that we are already a country with a younger generation very much impatient for that change.

Consider Jessica Shivers in "Prom Night in Mississippi." She is a high school senior in the small Southern town of Charleston, Miss., population 2,300. She is fiery, beautiful and on the lower end of the economic scale. That she is white is a defining characteristic in writer-director Paul Saltzman's telling documentary about the long tentacles of race that still wrap themselves around us.