Directed by Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster
Featuring Alondra Toledo, Daniela Blanco, Henry Onyango, Santosh Pandey, Jason Hadzikostas
Running time about 1 hour 30 minutes
Rated TV-14
Available on Disney+ March 12

by Jaime Davis, Staff Writer, the Fixer 

One of my favorite parts of the classic 2012 comedy, 21 Jump Street, is the scene when our lovably bumbling undercover duo Schmidt and Jenko go back to school for the first time and get in a mini-argument about their backpacks. If you haven’t seen the movie, when the two were in school for real (about 10 years prior), Schmidt was a super smartie and Jenko was the stereotypical jock popular boy with very little academical knowledge to speak of. Now, pretending to be modern high school kids, they’re both expecting a similar dynamic to play out as “new” students. As they get ready to head to school, Schmidt decides to “two-strap” his backpack–wearing the backpack securely on both shoulders. Jenko, however, is from the cool crowd and insists they “one-strap it”, even going so far as to say he would “no-strap it” if that were even possible. One-strapping it wins, and they head out. Until they get to the school parking lot and see that everyone is…two-strapping it. The look of pure confusion slash terror on poor Jenko’s face mixed with Schmidt’s anxiety at not two-strapping his backpack makes me laugh every time. This movie moment perfectly captures how times can change. 

When I was in high school in the late 90’s, you wouldn’t everrrr catch me two-strapping it. Nah, me and my friends were one-strap backpack folks for life. No lie, the first time I two-strapped my backpack, well into my 30’s walking to work was like…a revelation. So comfortable! So easy! But I felt conspicuous at first – is everybody looking at me? OMG do I look ridiculous? I obviously can’t speak for everyone around the same age as me, but in my high school, being smart and trying was not the norm; though there were overachievers, they were rare and probably not doing half as much as most average teens are doing today.

In my school, slacking off was typical for most while overachieving was not. I did the bare minimum to get grades my parents wouldn’t bug out about and did a couple activities in school but other than that, I wasn’t really engaged. I remember my mom going off at me about the neighbor girl down the street who got perfect SAT’s and was going to Princeton. I’m not even going to tell you what my SAT score was because it was beyond bad (I have test anxiety, which wasn’t really as much of a known thing as it is now and I didn’t study for it because I was too scared and worried about it to even deal). But anyway, my friends and I used to all laugh because none of us wanted to go to an Ivy League school like Princeton. The neighbor girl was the exception, the outlier, the weird one. At the time, my friends and I worshipped Reality Bites–if Lelaina Pierce, valedictorian of her university class, struggled after graduation and couldn’t find a job, why should we bother trying so hard anyway?

Fast forward about eight years later, and I found myself, post-undergraduate, post-film production career in Los Angeles, working at, of all places, an Ivy League university. After deciding to transition from an entertainment career to higher education, my day to day was spent co-running an undergraduate program between the Wharton School and Penn Engineering–advising students and making admissions decisions. It was eye-opening for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of how much had changed in less than ten years. All of a sudden, the apathy surrounding my generation had all but disappeared–now, students cared. They did multiple activities AND played sports AND did community service for all four years of high school. Overachieving was the new norm. Within the past 15 years, this mindset has expanded even further – with US college and university admissions more competitive than ever, students are doing so much, to the point that many are stressed out, burnt out, or worse. Young folks are also known to experience more anxiety about the environment, the economy, and the volatile world around them. They feel immense pressure on themselves to change the world for the better, to make advancements for the earth and for each other that will allow them not just to survive, but to thrive for several more decades to come. 

This is what led to my interest in Own the Room, the latest documentary from Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster, the duo behind 2018’s similar Science Fair. (Fun fact: Costantini is also co-director of the 2020 popular Netflix doc Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado.) In Science Fair, the filmmakers trail eager high school students from across the globe in their quest to win Best in Fair at the International Science Fair (which is a super big deal and looks fantastic on a college application). This time, in Own the Room, we follow five college students as they compete at the EO GSEA’s – the Entrepreneurs’ Organization Global Student Entrepreneur Awards. Each year, thousands of students who own and operate a business while in college compete locally, regionally, and nationally in pitch competitions around the world to become the EO GSEA Student Champion. The title comes with a cash prize of $25,000 USD and perks like mentorship and products to help run their business. While many other pitch competitions focus solely on the product or business, EO GSEA places particular emphasis on the person pitching–their story and inspiration behind their company or the product they’re trying to solve. Watching Own the Room for me, was extra exciting because it’s the perfect marriage of my day job and first love–movies.  

Own the Room features five highly engaging “studentpreneurs” from all parts of the world: Alondra Toledo from San Juan, Puerto Rico who brilliantly created an app that allows the Deaf community to communicate with medical professionals who may not know ASL; Henry Onyango from Nairobi, Kenya who’s company Roometo is racing to help fill gaps in Kenya’s student housing shortage (almost 700,000 university students in Kenya are forced to find their own school housing each year); Santosh Pandey from Kathmandu, Nepal – his company, Offering Happiness, provides opportunities for the over 5 million Nepalese working abroad to stay connected and engaged with family members far away; Daniela Blanco, a Venezuelan immigrant earning her PhD in chemical engineering at NYU whose company, Sunthetics, has developed a way to produce nylon using renewable and solar energy; and finally Jason Hadzikostas, a Greek student who developed an algorithm that analyzes a baby’s cries to determine why they’re crying and co-founded a company, iCry2Talk, to monetize it. While not as much attention or depth feels placed on Jason, every student’s story is inspiring, moving, and heartfelt. Every one of them has embraced numerous setbacks and hurdles to get to this point – you want them all to win. 

After the film initially introduces us to our competitors, the filmmakers usher us through the necessary steps as they prepare to head to Macau for the global finals. There are jitters for sure, but everyone featured is also excited to see their peers–this is a passionate, supportive community of student entrepreneurs who seem to genuinely care about one another. There is joy and pain in their travels to Macau; Alondra arrives with her close-knit family, Daniela and her mother are reunited in the country after being separated since she moved to the US, Santosh and Jason happily journey on their own, and Henry navigates such frustrating, egregious racial profiling after landing with so much poise, it made my heart hurt. Electrified, they all go through their initial pitch before being whittled down to just seven finalists. And from there, over the kind of large banquet event I haven’t attended in what feels like years, the EO GSEA Student Champion is named, amid many tears and hearty smiles. Own the Room is the story of possibility, of daring to dream, of having the audacity to advocate for change even when people believe you can’t or when life holds you back. Simply put, it’s an inspirational film that teaches persistence–that there’s always a way towards something you believe in. I’m rooting for all of the overachievers in this film and you will too.