Powerful ‘Kids’ Portrays Art as a Teacher of Survival

The Grande 4-Plex concludes its “Documentary Days,” perhaps the strongest series it has ever presented, with a one-week run of Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s stirring “Kids of Survival: The Art and Life of Tim Rollins and K.O.S.”

Since 1984, artist-educator Tim Rollins has run his ambitious and demanding Kids of Survival program as a way of reaching out to troubled youths through art.

Housed on a floor in a vast old factory building in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx, K.O.S. was launched with a mere $8,000 in seed money from the National Endowment for the Arts. Yet it is self-sustaining. According to the boyish-looking but tough-minded Rollins, the program survives on a day-to-day basis; K.O.S. art must sell--and some of it has ended up in major museums and collections--if it is to continue.

Geller and Goldfine focus on five Latino males, ranging in age from 13 to 20. All of them are very likable, but with the exception of the youngest, an honor student, they all have had either severe problems with learning--several are dyslexic--or truancy or both.

“K.O.S.” shows how profoundly negative the effects of being on the low rungs of the socioeconomic ladder can be for young people. While maintaining firm discipline on the one hand, Rollins fights a constant battle to build within his students self-respect and self-confidence.

Just think of it: One young man, Carlos, has been in the program for 10 years, but if he reaches 21 before completing his high school course, he will be thrown out of the system. His only hope is to go to summer school, yet he misses the first three days, much to Rollins’ outrage.

In short, it takes an enormous amount of effort upon Rollins’ part to see these students through to their high school diplomas; less than a third of ninth-graders actually graduate in their district. Consequently, the film becomes genuinely suspenseful in terms of how these students turn out and how well they cope with events outside the classroom in the months during which the filmmakers “eavesdrop” on their everyday lives as unobtrusively as the famous fly on the wall.

The guiding principle of Rollins’ methods is that all K.O.S. art must be inspired by a literary classic, which the students must read and discuss. To describe one of the group’s simpler efforts, for example, Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” yielded a huge mural in which fragments of auto glass and mirror were glued to a black background.

The amazing unobtrusiveness of the filmmakers and the potent tug of the teacher-pupil struggles combine so compellingly that you wish the filmmakers had risked being as rigorous as Rollins is himself.

For example: When confronted with the very real possibility that Carlos might drop out of school, Rollins, determined that he won’t, reels off a list of about eight students who had defected. That’s virtually the only reference to failure, but we become sufficiently involved in the film to want to know just how successful the program really has been over the years in inspiring the students to get their diplomas and to embark upon successful lives and careers.

We also never know whether the group’s seemingly invariably large-scale projects are always based on Rollins’ ideas--that’s the way it seems--or whether students ever contribute to their genesis. And curator-art historian Kellie Jones asks why Rollins always selects books that are from the “Western canonical texts,” a good question left unanswered.

Dealing with such questions would have made an already strong film seem stronger. Geller and Goldfine latched on to a very strong and pertinent subject for a documentary that packs an emotional wallop--strong enough not only to sustain complete candor but also to use such candor as a way to make “K.O.S.” a stronger film than it already is.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: The film has some strong language and an incident too intense for younger children.

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‘Kids of Survival’

A Geller/Goldfine production. Producers-directors Daniel Geller & Dayna Goldfine. Cinematographer Geller. Editors Elizabeth Finlayson, Geller, Eve Goldberg, Goldfine. Music Todd Boekelheide. Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes.

* Exclusively at the Grande 4-Plex for one week, 345 S. Figueroa St., downtown Los Angeles, (213) 617-0268.