Schooling Jewel

17-year-old student Jewel Offor is the central character in SCHOOLING JEWEL. She is in her final year at Central East High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she is one of the brighter pupils. In the first semester, everything revolves around the competition to be elected homecoming queen. Jewel is determined to become the first black winner in the history of the school. When instead of her the blonde girl Melissa wins, Jewel is severely disillusioned. But then the votes appear to have been tampered with; the actual winner is Jewel’s classmate Tashia, who is also black. Jewel questions the ingrained racism betrayed by these proceedings, but nobody seems to care a bit. The next semester, to her father’s great anger, Jewel starts a relationship with Glen, a rich man of 46. When against her father’s wish she spends a weekend in New York with Glen, she is thrown out of the house. This sets Jewel thinking and she severs the relationship. At the end of the school year, Jewel has been transformed from a girl into a young woman. The filmmakers work in direct-cinema style; they follow the events in Jewel’s and some of her classmate’s lives from close by, without interfering too much.