UIC students talk to director about film’s impact

UIC student Malory Frouin admitted to filmmaker Kevin Shaw that she cried at the end of “Let the Little Light Shine.”

Shaw shot the documentary in 2018 and 2019 at National Teachers Academy, a K-8 school in the Prairie District portion of the South Loop, a neighborhood then being considered for redistricting. The proposal would have made the National Teachers Academy, a predominantly Black elementary and middle school, into a neighborhood high school.

In 2025, the film is required viewing in adjunct lecturer Matthew Furlong’s Introduction to Economic Geography course at UIC. Many students in the class are urban education majors or from the College of Education, and this is the first year Furlong has put the film on his syllabus. He asked Shaw to his class to talk with students about the film for a part of the course on racial inequalities in school districts.

Frouin, a second-year urban education major, got the discussion going when Shaw visited Sept. 17.

“Seeing kids who look like me and we’re around the same age when the film was shot was really moving,” Frouin said. “When I was in eighth grade, I was just discovering what my race means in America, and the fact that these kids were already protesting, they really found their voice. I was so proud of them, and it was really empowering because I thought, ‘I can do the same thing.’”

When the documentary was shown last fall at the University of Chicago, Furlong gave extra credit in the course to students who attended the screening.

“I was shocked at how many students would give up their Saturday evening to go to another school for this film,” Furlong said. “For many of these students, it was relevant because of their major and it was about their own community. I added it to the course this year because Kevin can tell the story better than me.”

Shaw, who grew up on Chicago’s Far South Side, started filming at National Teachers Academy after finding success as a segment director and cinematographer on “America to me,” a documentary series set at Oak Park River Forest High School and shown on Starz in 2018. Many of Shaw’s works address topics in America’s inner cities, like education, sports and neighborhood preservation.

Shaw told the class about the importance of the relationships he and his sound engineer built during the filming of “Let the Little Light Shine.” He also said he has kept in touch with many of the students and staff featured in the film.

“I think every time we make a film like this that looks at social issues, you want to have some impact that goes beyond people just watching it,” Shaw said after the class ended. “You want to have that dialog. You want to have people really examining some of the issues that the film presents and thinking deeply about them. If you have people who are looking to enter education as teachers or potentially administrators, they’re going to have to deal with things like these, too.”

Frouin said talking to the filmmaker after seeing such a moving documentary was an impressive component to a geography class.

“It was really nice, honestly,” she said, “and I felt so special, because how many people could say they spoke to a director after watching his film? He’s an important figure in Chicago.”

Shaw’s next film, “One Golden Summer,” revisits the baseball players of the Jackie Robinson West Little League team, the first all-Black squad to win the U.S. Little League championship, which they did in 2014. It will premiere Oct. 15 to open the Chicago International Film Festival.

“I like to tell stories that engage debate,” Shaw told the class. “These are not easy questions to answer, and the topics aren’t black and white. Maybe we’ve all been told one thing about how education works, and now we have an opportunity to look at it in a different manner and a different way.”