Private Project

We Have Your Kids

Grassroots journalism at its best, Coe outs economic systems that abridged students' human rights. Loving parents get trapped in a gangster-noir of tax-profiteers, and political deception, as they fight to save their kids lives from a million dollar corruption.

"If an emergency (with the encircling trains) happens we're screwed," student.

A crowd pleasing eye opener by the first parents in the nation to STOP A SCHOOL CLOSING.

“Gives voice to the voiceless; a grass-roots, underdog, David & Goliath”, reviews Alan Ng. We Have Your kids is a Michael Moore-type exposé. WE HAVE YOUR KIDS is true crime in school, "Like The Irishman", "Corrupt, Corrupting, Corruption", Alan Ng writes six times, 8/10.

Students face a monster: the state & private trillion-dollar for profit ed. industry that strips kids of their rights, intimidates and retaliates against parents using police intimidation and frameups to enforces tax profiteering.

“A train track (carrying various deadly fuels and chemicals) circles the three schools with a single two-lane road that provides access to school for the parents and students every morning and afternoon. A potentially deadly nightmarish situation, but that’s not the problem. “The problem? Money and power with virtually no checks or balances.” Ng.

Students are blinded to the coercive financial systems incarcerating and indoctrinating them. School Boards represents the employees against students, and superintendents closing schoools to obtain their loot for Wall Street, insurance & banks. We're embedded soldiers for the kids in a roiling war pitting Teacher’s Union “special interests” and Wall Street determined to destroy Chatham's "National School of Character."

It's a roaring Mr. Smith goes to the School Board. Have American schools gone the way of Congress, the Executive branch and courts, where money runs the elections, and representatives can’t even pretend to represent the public? How can criminal corporate interests keep taxing for schools no longer schooling and employees no longer employed?

  • Wayne Coe
    Director
    Grim Prairie Tales (James Earl Jones & Brad Dourif)
  • Wayne Coe
    Writer
    Grim Prairie Tales, Art Center Recruitment Video (CASE winner)
  • Wayne Coe
    Producer
    Grim Prairie Tales, Art Center Recruitment Video (CASE winner)
  • Banks, Insurance & Wall Street
    Key Cast
    "Banks, Insurance & Wall Street"
    1987, 2001, 2008 stockmarket crashes
  • Wayne Coe
    Key Cast
    "Wayne Coe"
    2 time Emmy-nominated illustrator, Artnet "brilliant artist"
  • Steve Gilger
    Key Cast
    "Steve Gilger"
    Parent, Actor
  • Board of Education
    Key Cast
    "Chatham Central School District Board of Education"
    Unionized. Unresponsive.
  • Cheryl Nuciforo
    Key Cast
    "Superintendent"
    Paid $240,000 per year to close poor kids schools
  • Chatham Middle School
    Key Cast
    "National School of Character"
    Best School in the Nation
  • NYSUT
    Key Cast
    "NYS Teachers Union"
    #1 Federal Lobbyist
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Documentary, Feature
  • Genres:
    True Crime, Education, noir, economic, human rights, capitalism, police, surveillance, unions, corporate crime
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 48 minutes 30 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    March 10, 2021
  • Production Budget:
    150,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    HD
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Distribution Information
  • Prostoryboard LLC
    Country: United States
    Rights: All Rights
Director Biography - Wayne Coe

Two time Emmy-nominated illustrator and writer/director Wayne Coe (Grim Prairie Tales, with James Earl Jones and Brad Dourif) has been producing documentary shorts for over 10 years. WE HAVE YOUR KIDS is Coe’s third feature-length film. 

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

WE HAVE YOUR KIDS is a financial Film-Noir procedural showing taxpayer vs capitalist, parent vs plutocrat, student vs state. Vigilante justice is the plot, like Lang’s THE BIG HEAT, where parents fearlessly pursue a school administration threatening their kids. Noir themes of manipulation, lies, sadism, corruption, violence roar like the deafening trains of oil that encircle the school.

The citizen-detectives examine school power, mastering the mystery of what agents are bent on killing the school and who bags the consolidation loot.

The tawdry HS library is dehumanizing-by-intent, citizens are mice for state cats. This "board room" is a landscape of despair, an emotionally barren, social wasteland mimicking THE THIRD MAN's bombed our cities and the vacant boulevards in THEY LIVE BY NIGHT. The administrative menagerie is pure Kafka/Well’s THE TRIAL: rules made up on the spot, evictions, insults, threats & frame-ups; a mockery of justice, medieval & haunting.

Think gas-lit taverns of Lang’s ‘M’, the streaming sewers of THE THIRD MAN, Ford’s expressionist alleys in THE INFORMANT mirror school's crime underworld. We Have Your Kids’ capitalists come alive through motion graphics; dispassionate, calculating, numerical, soul-dooming & irrefutable.

The film’s explosive train motif bloomed in post. It expressed my viscerally felt child-endangerment, the militaristic threats from the billion-dollar education industry grinding implacably, inexorably toward some inscrutable parasite consuming the host profit.

Noir is under-lit, shot by night, shot desperate cheap. Our kids lives were in danger, I couldn’t wait to find funding, couldn’t stop to beg help. As a journalist in the tradition of Bellycat, We worked alone, under constant pressure and captured the urgent & agonizing manifestation of the education industry James Baldwin said, “There is a reason, there is a reason, no one wants our children to this day to be educated. When we attempt ourselves to do it, we find ourselves up against a vast machinery of the system of education in this country, which is among other things, a billion-dollar industry; and a billion-dollar industry is more important, than the life of a child."