MAD HOT BALLROOM

“***½ Watching these lively people, young and old, express their wishes, confess their fears and kick up their heels is enough to make you proud to be a New Yorker. Heck, proud to be human.” –Gene Seymour, NEWSDAY

“Irresistible! Spellbound crossed with Strictly Ballroom!” - Kenneth Turan, LA Times

Every year, dozens of fifth graders in teams from public schools all across the New York City engage in a hotly contested competition to determine which school has produced the year’s best ballroom dancers. The competition is the culmination of months of intense, sometimes chaotic, and frequently humorous rehearsals captured in this joyful and uplifting film. Focusing on about a dozen students from three distinctly different parts of the city, Mad Hot Ballroom accomplishes the remarkable feat of making us feel what it’s like to be at that awkward pre-teen age, trying to make your brain and body do something very adult when your heart is screaming that you’re just a kid. Told from the kids’ perspective, the film lets us follow them to their playgrounds and homes. As they learn the intricacies of the rhumba, the fox trot, and swing dancing, we learn a lot about them and what it’s like to grow up in very different parts of America’s great melting pot. (USA, 2005, 110 min.)