Jason Levesque, left, America Minaya, director Timothy Hotchner and Yazmine Lopez attend the Rhode Island International Film Festival.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

The most Rhode Island moment of the Rhode Island International Film Festival probably came on Thursday night when the stars showed up on Broadway.

“I’m excited and I’m nervous,” said Yazmine Lopez.

That’s understandable. She was about to join a large crowd of strangers to watch a very personal piece of her life on the screen at the Columbus Theater Arts Center.

In Accelerating America, she is the kid you can’t stand and the one you root for and the one who brings you damn close to tears when she stands at the podium at graduation in her boffo white dress and says to Rob DeBlois:

“Thank you for not kicking me out, even though I put you through hell.”

DeBlois is the man who created the Urban Collaborative Accelerated Program (UCAP) 20 years ago in Providence. He knows about being put through hell. He knows what a person has to be ready for when he or she chooses to rescue kids from the discard pile of public education.

“I’m hoping this movie will be seen by a lot of people,” said DeBlois as he sat in his wheelchair on Broadway as large crowds waited in line to enter the theater. “It gives people a real understanding of what ‘at risk’ kids are about.”

This movie should be seen by a bunch of people. If you have any concern for the high dropout rate in urban schools, if you wonder even for a second just where those dropouts might end up, or if you just want a close, honest look at the way too many kids are living, then you will want to see Accelerating America.

It was on the screen Thursday night because way back in 1994 when he was at Brown, one of his advisers told Tim Hotchner about a man who was doing something groundbreaking in education. So Hotchner went to meet Rob DeBlois and see UCAP and realized that something was being done in Providence that was being done nowhere else. Three years ago, he came back as an independent filmmaker and convinced DeBlois and three of his students to give him extremely close and personal access to their lives.

“It was a little creepy,” says America Minaya. “He was there when I got up, there when I got home.”

If it was creepy, it was also incredibly honest and revealing. For more than a year, Hotchner was there to show how UCAP is the counterbalance to the social and educational nightmares that leave too many kids with little reason to pick up a book and get serious.

“Look at these kids,” said DeBlois. “They’re not bad kids. They’re nice kids who are worth our best efforts and right now they’re not getting them.”

UCAP is all about those best efforts. It is an independent public school established by an act of the General Assembly. The kids who come there from public schools in Central Falls, Cranston and Providence have all repeated one grade. Some say they have been called stupid in a classroom.

So they come to UCAP and find a staff that is amazingly resistant to old and tired excuses for failure. They meet teachers and counselors who know exactly where they’re coming from and have heard every creative obscenity known to the English-speaking world. And they discover things like curiosity and possibility.

“I loved UCAP,” said Jason Levesque. “It was a perfect fit.”

He and Lopez and Minaya were on Broadway with DeBlois and the UCAP staff Thursday night, waiting to see the movie about a very crucial year in their teenage lives. They had seen some trailers, but not the entire 90-minute film.

They saw themselves defiant, surly, rude, hopeful, grateful, thoughtful, reflective, despondent. Hotchner’s camera moves through housing projects in Providence, to a street shrine assembled in memory of a murdered kid, down the hallways at UCAP and into the church where America Minaya finds solace. It follows the teenagers home, where extremely caring foster parents describe life with Minaya as trying to “contain the wind.” Levesque explains that his father has gone to New Mexico and not left a phone number behind.

A minute with Lopez’s family in their apartment is enough to explain the challenges she faces.

And at Rob DeBlois’ house, his wife, Bonnie, explains that, even after a swimming accident in college left him paralyzed and in a wheelchair, she saw no reason to break up with the guy.

Throughout this wonderful film are the tough, funny, resilient, determined people who work at UCAP and refuse to let a kid slip away without trying everything to stop it from happening. There are some obscenity-laced discussions on good choices and bad. There are suspensions and one near brush with disaster after another.

The successes are all the more amazing for all that it is thrown in the way of them almost every day. In the end, Lopez wipes away tears at the podium and pays tribute to DeBlois for staying with her. She and Levesque were both accepted at Blackstone Academy in Pawtucket. He graduated. He is working in a body shop and hopes to go to college in environmental studies. Lopez graduated from the Job Corps Academy and is studying criminal justice at Gibbs College.

America Minaya, who lent her name to the title of the film, walked away from UCAP and the group home where she was living in North Providence.

“With a lot of kids, the competition of more interesting activities outside of school sometimes wins out,” says DeBlois.

bkerr@projo.com