For Ahkeem is the coming-of-age story of Daje Shelton, a black 17-year-old girl in North St. Louis. She fights for her future as she is placed in an alternative high school and navigates the marginalized neighborhoods, biased criminal justice policies and economic devastation that have set up many black youth like her to fail.

The film will be released theatrically in New York on October 13. It will playing in Manhattan at The Village East, and will be opening in Brooklyn tomorrow at BAM with a Q&A with the directors after the 7 p.m. show. 

It opens in Los Angeles on October 20 at Laemmle Theatres.

In a review for the film at the Tribeca Film Festival, S&A film critic Aramide Tinubu said, For Ahkeem plays like a visual diary, capturing the final days of Daje’s adolescence on film. By letting Daje tell her own story, Levine and Van Soest’s film proves that girlhood, love, and determination can exist anywhere, even amongst the rubble in the wake of Ferguson, and in the most impoverished and forgotten corners of this country. It’s also a story about the curveballs that life throws our way when we least expect them.”

Watch two exclusive clips of the from the film below: