Just Another Girl On The I.R.T

Chantel is a seventeen-year-old Brooklynite who is beautiful, smart, popular and absolutely full of attitude. Like most girls her age, she wants it all and is determined to get it. Endearing - not. She is as insulting to the uptight Manhattanites who frequent the grocery store where she is employed, as she is to the Jewish high-school professor determined to teach an African American student body about the Holocaust, as she is to her boyfriend, who just doesn't have the right car Midway through the film, her joy ride takes a turn for what appears to be the worse, but she reacts to a life-changing event not with introspection and remorse, but with denial, narcissism, and renewed, well, attitude.

Bound to be compared with Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It. Leslie Harris's portrait of a contemporary young African American woman rings perhaps truer in that she is an unidealized character created by a female filmmaker. Harris has the courage in this film to invent a character whom certain audiences may find unlikable. but that dislike may spring from envy. Chantel is a girl who may or may not act appropriately at all times. She is also a woman with incredible drive, generosity, insecurity, and the know-how ultimately to get everything she wants. "It's time for African American women to tell their stories in cinema." claims Harris. Perhaps this film will signal to audiences that it is time to listen.

-Andrea Alsberg

Source: Written by Andrea Alsberg, http://history.sundance.org/films/390