The Intercept’s new documentary, “Freedom Dreams: Black Women and the Student Debt Crisis,” profiles Black women educators and activists struggling under the weight of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, in student loan debt. The title is inspired by scholar and activist Robin D. G. Kelley’s eponymous book, and the film is narrated by former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, a longtime ally of the growing debt abolition movement.

As directors Erick Stoll and Astra Taylor and the film’s cast demonstrate, a lack of intergenerational wealth and persistent wage discrimination force women, and Black women in particular, to borrow at disproportionate rates and struggle with repayment. Reactionary policy decisions have transformed education, long trumpeted as a ladder of upward mobility, into a debt trap.

Read more in The Intercept.

Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker, writer, and political organizer. She is the director, most recently, of “What Is Democracy?” and the author of “Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone.”

Co-published with The Intercept.