At the Oscars earlier this month, the two-time winner Mahershala Ali (“Moonlight,” “Green Book”) presented the best supporting actress statue in front of his Hollywood peers and millions of people watching live on television.But the next morning, he was more interested in discussing a humbler but no less momentous occasion: the first time he had ever spoken before an audience. He was 9, at bible camp, and he had written a poem.“I ended up performing it in front of the whole church,” he recalled during a phone interview earlier this month. “The courage that it took to go up there and share it, and see how people were impacted by it, was really empowering.”Ali sees a bit of himself in the young orators captured in the documentary “We Are the Dream: The Kids of the Oakland MLK Oratorical Fest,” which premiered this week on HBO. Directed by the Emmy-winning filmmaker Amy Schatz (“Song of Parkland,” “In the Shadow of the Towers”), the film follows several Oakland students during the lead up to last year’s installment of the annual festival, its 40th, which was founded as a platform for students to shine and connect with Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and words.With its focus on young orators as they refine their speeches with their coaches, teachers and families, the film is a hopeful counterpoint to the spate of murder and true-crime docs on cable and streaming TV, shining a light on “this little outlet and platform of self esteem,” Ali said. In addition to appearing on HBO’s usual linear and on-demand platforms, the film was made available to nonsubscribers for a month on the network’s website.Ali, who was born in Oakland and grew up nearby, joined the film after it had been shot — he was asked to executive produce through his Know Wonder production company, which has a partnership with HBO.“I think they felt like it was a nice fit,” said Ali, who was happy to use his connections and Bay Area roots to “raise awareness about the children, teachers, their families.” The other executive producers include the actor’s wife, Amatus Sami-Karim, as well as Mimi Valdés (“Hidden Figures”) and Julie Anderson (“God Is the Bigger Elvis”).It was Anderson who first conceived “We Are the Dream”; the idea came to her from reading “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.” (edited by Clayborne Carson) while producing the 2018 documentary “Rise Up: The Movement that Changed America,” directed by Stanley Nelson to mark the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination.The book included a story about King, as a high school student, entering (and winning) a student oratory competition about 90 miles outside Atlanta in 1944. On their bus ride home afterward, King and his teacher were ordered to give up their seats to white passengers — the young King wanted to resist, but his teacher convinced him not to escalate the situation. So they stood in the aisle all the way back to Atlanta. (When Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger 11 years later in Montgomery, Ala., it sparked the boycott that brought King to the forefront of the Civil Rights movement.)“I just thought about the contrast of what that would look like,” Anderson said. “This young kid who made an oratory competition. He talks about Lincoln; he talks about equality; he talks about justice; and then he gets on a bus and faces the height of injustice.”Anderson said she spent time on YouTube watching speech videos from other King-themed student oratory contests in states like Texas, Ohio and Virginia. She selected the Oakland Unified School District because of the diversity of the student body and contest’s longstanding importance in the community.In the Oakland event, competing students can perform their own original poems, monologues and scenes in addition to well-known speeches by King and others. The festival is less about competition than about encouraging the students to “bridge the past and the present as we are thinking about their futures,” said Awele Makeba, an educator and professional storyteller who produces the contest and appears in “We Are the Dream.”It’s about “the possibility of who they want to become,” Makeba added, “and the world they want to create.”Schatz, known for her documentaries and series about children confronting what she called “life’s big subjects,” like climate change and gun violence, originally thought “We Are the Dream” would be about the contest itself and largely consist of profiles of the winners.But after spending time with the student orators, she decided the story should be more about “these issues that the kids were grappling with and the subjects that they cover, like race, social justice, gentrification, immigration,” she said. “And then also ideas about kindness or what it means to do the right thing.”For example, Karunyan Kamalraj, a 9-year-old boy from Sri Lanka, had never heard of King before getting involved in the contest. But as viewers see in the film, Kamalraj learns to draws connections between King’s nonviolent movement and his own family’s past struggles as part of the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka.“I realized through this boy Karunyan that it was about what Martin Luther King contributed to the world,” Schatz said.These moments of development and discovery give “We Are the Dream” its most poignant scenes. A poem by Lamiya Mohammed, 12, written to be performed as a duet with her 6-year-old sister, Abrar, was inspired by an incident in which a random passer-by called their mother a terrorist. In the poem, Mohammed imagines an America where Muslim children and their families are welcomed and can wear their “scarves” (hijabs) freely without rebuke.As Gregory Payton, the 9-year-old grandson of a Baptist minister, practices an address interweaving King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech with the 23rd Psalm, viewers see him starting to master the crescendos and flourishes of the African-American rhetorical traditions of his grandfather and King. “Give it that Gregory Payton power,” says Zerita Sharp, his coach.Payton reminds Ali a little of another 9-year-old orator from once upon a time, he said. But more important, the boy’s performance embodies the festival’s synthesis of legacy and optimism that “We Are the Dream” aimed to capture.“Seeing Gregory sort of metabolize pieces of Dr. King’s message and just take ownership of it makes me, as an adult, feel like we are the hope,” Ali said. “We have the responsibility to continue to strive for a world that is fair and inclusive and free.” More
