The Black Nerds: JUST ANOTHER GIRL ON THE I.R.T (1993) – New 4K Restoration!

 

A love letter to early ’90s Brooklyn, screening at the Revue Cinema.

Welcome to Chantel’s world!

In Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., director Leslie Harris introduces us to a bright, sharp-tongued, deeply confident 17-year-old Black girl navigating Brooklyn with big dreams and even bigger opinions. Chantel lives with her working-class family in the projects, rides the IRT daily, and speaks directly to us, inviting the audience into her world with humor, attitude, and absolute certainty about who she is NOT going to become.

She’s not “just another girl.”

A straight-A student with medical school on her mind, Chantel believes she’s mapped her escape route out of the hood. She’s smart. She’s observant. She’s culturally aware. And she’s very clear about how she sees herself in relation to everyone else around her. The film moves with the energy of youth, playful, fast, vibrant, and grounded in the textures of early ’90s Brooklyn: school hallways, cramped apartments, street corners, subway platforms.

At first, Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. feels light on its feet, almost breezy. Harris lets us settle into Chantel’s voice, her confidence, her friendships, her worldview. But quietly, almost invisibly, something deeper is unfolding beneath the surface. The film never announces its intentions. It lets conversations, jokes, and offhand comments do the work. The cracks are there if you’re paying attention.

And then the story shifts.

What Harris does next is the film’s quiet provocation. Without sensationalism or moral grandstanding, she allows real life to interrupt the plans Chantel has so carefully constructed. The movie becomes less about a single moment and more about the conditions surrounding it, about access, information, denial, pressure, and the weight of expectation placed on young Black girls to be both exceptional and invulnerable.

This is where Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. reveals its power.

Harris refuses easy binaries. Chantel is capable and immature. Insightful and stubborn. Self-aware and deeply human. Played with electric charisma by Ariyan Johnson, she is never reduced to a lesson or a symbol. The film trusts its audience to sit with contradiction, to understand that intelligence does not equal immunity, and ambition does not erase circumstance.

Formally, the film is just as bold as its subject. Shot on a shoestring budget, it blends direct-to-camera confession, hip-hop and R&B, and vérité realism into something that feels both intimate and confrontational. Chantel tells her story in her own words, reclaiming a narrative space that cinema has historically denied Black girls.

Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, went on to win the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and was acquired by Miramax. And yet, despite the acclaim, it slipped through the cracks, dismissed by many critics who seemed uncomfortable with a Black teenage girl being this complex, this central, and this uncompromising.

Nearly three decades later, a painstaking digital restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Academy Archive has brought the film back into circulation, where it belongs.

For The Black Nerds, this screening is about more than rediscovery. It’s about giving space to a film that dared to imagine Black girlhood outside of stereotype, violence, or respectability. A film that understands that sometimes the most radical thing you can do is let a young Black woman speak, honestly, imperfectly, and on her own terms.

Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. doesn’t ask for your pity.

 

It commands your attention. -Faduma Gure