"For Ahkeem" ... reminds white audiences that it is not enough to agree that black lives matter, but that it is also necessary to try and understand how black lives are lived.

| Mar 15, 2018

By simply documenting Deja's humanity, For Ahkeem offers a vivid example of the incontrovertible fact that black lives matter.

| Original Score: B | Dec 15, 2017

[For Ahkeem] is a compelling but often frustrating documentary, a microcosm of the struggles faced by many disadvantaged young people of color today.

| Dec 15, 2017

For Ahkeem doesn't present anything new, but perhaps there's no need to: Its focus on one young woman struggling to graduate implicitly says that no matter how common the story, every person matters.

| Dec 15, 2017

Levine and Van Soest are on top of their subjects with a startling familiarity and shoot in such a clean, unfiltered style that at times you question if they're working from a script or if their subjects are actors.

| Original Score: A- | Dec 1, 2017

A tenderly intimate, affecting documentary portrait ...

| Oct 19, 2017

The story that is told here, with such heartbreaking clarity, is an important one, but it is hard to watch.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 19, 2017

About as close as documentaries come to putting us inside the mind of someone who society easily overlooks.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 13, 2017

While the film ends at a logical stopping point, it feels incomplete. It probably could have used a few more years of filming.

| Oct 12, 2017

A rich, inspiring, and at times infuriating evocation of Daje's inner life.

| Oct 11, 2017

The weight of the systemic racism they experience is crushing enough to make it hard to imagine that Daje and Antoine will be able to offer their son any more opportunities than they have themselves.

| May 10, 2017

It's a sort of bad-luck situation most documentarians secretly dream of, but to their credit, For Ahkeem's co-directors don't exploit the situation, merely letting their cameras continue to capture Daje's ever-dire situation.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 26, 2017

For Ahkeem is a visual diary, capturing the final days of adolescence on film. It's a compelling film story about life's unexpected curveballs.

| Apr 23, 2017

A poignant snapshot of black struggle that humanizes a range of social issues through the first-hand experiences of one young woman.

| Feb 13, 2017